In baseball, a position player is a player who on defense plays as an infielder, outfielder, or catcher. This is generally all players on a team except for the pitcher, who is considered separate from the position players; in the American League, there is also a designated hitter, who bats but does not play any defensive positions (and is therefore not a position player). Position players are eligible to pitch, and a manager may have a player do so in the case of a blowout during a game, or if he runs out of eligible pitchers in a game, usually occurring when the game goes into many extra innings. However, this is rare.
The term is also used in hockey, to refer to all non-goaltender players, although skater is the more common term in hockey.
Famous quotes containing the words position and/or player:
“Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)
“Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)