Dan Uggla can play defense

It sometimes astounds me that people keep writing articles such as the following: (this one courtesy of CBS Sports)

Florida Marlins: How can a team that employs Dan Uggla and Jorge Cantu say with a straight face that it hopes to emphasize run-prevention? In the wake of the Rays' and Phillies' success in 2008, defense is the new black. That's still no reason to consider handing a significant number of at-bats to Emilio Bonifacio, whose contact with pitched balls can only be described as "accidental." It's just the Marlins' luck that none of their clangy infield bashers has the athletic ability to play an outfield corner.

Okay, Cantu is a hack at third base, I won't deny that.  But he does a decent job of playing first.  But I will give Cantu credit, he put the excitement back into the routine ground ball to third.  If he did come up with it cleanly it was always interesting to see where the throw was going to land.

Cantu isn't much of defensive third baseman, or at least he wasn't last season.  But that doesn't mean he doesn't possess some defensive skills.  It just turned out they were better suited across the diamond.

Uggla, on the other hand, did a good job at second.  I have no idea where the author gets his information, but where ever he does it's inaccurate.

If you want to use a lame defensive stat, Fielding Percentage, Danny finished 5th among the qualified 2nd basemen in the NL.  If you would like to get fancier, Uggla finished 6th in RZR and second in OOZ at second base in the NL.

In case you are wondering what RZR and OOZ stands for, let me help.

RZR is the revised zone rating and is the proportion of balls hit into a fielder's zone that he converts to outs.

OOZ is the total number of outs made outside of his zone.

In other words, Danny fielded his position neatly and showed he had some range.

Granted, there are other defensive stats that may be better, but I don't care which ones you choose, none of them will show Danny to be a bad defensive second baseman in 2008.  

That said, you could always go with the only time I watched Uggla was during the All-Star game, so therefore he must be bad.  If that is your metric of choice, then you are a fool.