Out of Position in MLB The Show: Penalties, Secondary Positions, and How to Use Them
What "Out of Position" Means
Every card in Diamond Dynasty has a primary position — the one printed on the card — and some cards also list one or more secondary positions underneath it.
Put a player anywhere else and the game calls it out of position, usually shortened to OOP.
There are three tiers, and they are not close to equal:
- Primary position — no penalty. This is the card as designed.
- Secondary position — a small penalty. Listed on the card, and cheap enough that you should almost never worry about it.
- Out of position — a real penalty. Not listed on the card, and the cost swings wildly depending on where you're moving them.
That last tier is the one that decides games, and it's the one almost nobody has good numbers on.
What the Penalty Actually Changes
This is the single most misunderstood part of out-of-position play, so let's be blunt about it.
Only three defensive attributes move:
- Fielding
- Reactions
- Arm Accuracy
These never move, no matter how far out of position you go:
- Arm Strength
- Speed
- Blocking
- Pop Time
And most importantly:
Your hitting is completely untouched. Contact, Power, Vision, Discipline, Clutch — none of it changes. A 99 bat is a 99 bat whether he's at his primary position or somewhere he's never played.
That one fact reframes the whole decision. You are never trading offense for defense when you move a player. You are only ever trading defense for defense — the glove you lose at the new spot against the bat you gain by getting that card into the lineup at all.
The Rounding Trap Nobody Talks About
Here's the finding that surprised us most when we measured this.
The game applies the penalty as a percentage, and then it rounds down — hard. There's no partial credit and no rounding up.
For a player with elite defense, that barely registers. Knock a few percent off a 90 Fielding and you still have a very good glove.
For a player who was already a below-average defender, it's a cliff. We watched attributes in the 40s and 50s fall into single digits on aggressive moves. Not "worse." Effectively zero.
The practical rule: out-of-position penalties are survivable for good defenders and catastrophic for bad ones. The same move that costs an elite fielder a little polish can leave a poor fielder with a glove that functionally does not exist.
This is why "just throw the bat out there" works for some cards and produces highlight-reel disasters with others. It was never about the position. It was about how much defense the player had to spare.
Which Moves Are Cheap, and Which Are Disasters
We measured this in-game across a large number of position combinations. Here's the shape of what we found, which is the part that actually helps you build.
Nearly free
- Left field to right field, and back
- Center field to either corner outfield spot
A center fielder is the most portable defender in the game. If a card can handle center, the corners are close to a non-event.
Cheap enough to do without thinking
- Shortstop to second base
- Shortstop to third base
- Any listed secondary position
Shortstop is the most valuable eligibility in Diamond Dynasty for exactly this reason. It travels almost anywhere on the infield.
Costly — do it only with an elite glove
- Second base to shortstop
- Second base to third base
- Corner outfield to center field
- Middle infield to the outfield
Notice the asymmetry: moving down the defensive spectrum is cheap, moving up it is expensive. Shortstop to second is easy. Second to shortstop is not. The game charges you for demanding more range and accuracy than the card was built for.
Don't
- Anyone to catcher
- Outfielder to any infield position
These are the moves where even a great defender lands somewhere unusable.
The Rules You Can't Break
A few restrictions aren't penalties at all — they're hard walls.
- Catcher is effectively a closed position. Non-catchers behind the plate take the harshest penalty in the game, and Blocking and Pop Time don't improve to compensate. There is no version of this that works.
- Pitchers can't play the field. And in Diamond Dynasty, they can't DH either — the exception is two-way players, who keep their hitting eligibility exactly as you'd expect.
How to Actually Use This
Out of position isn't a penalty to avoid. It's a tool — and used well, it's one of the biggest sources of free value in team building.
- Get your best bats on the field. The hitting is untouched. If your best available hitter is a left fielder and you already have three better left fielders, moving him to first base or DH costs you nothing offensively and gets a real bat into the lineup.
- Use the defensive spectrum in the right direction. Slide shortstops down to second and third. Slide center fielders out to the corners. Both are cheap. Avoid the reverse.
- Protect the hard positions. Catcher, shortstop and center field should be filled by real ones. Everything else is negotiable.
- Check the actual rating, not your intuition. This is the one that costs people the most. A penalized rating at an easier position frequently beats an unpenalized rating at a hard one, because every position weighs attributes differently. Second base asks less of a glove than shortstop does — so a great shortstop can grade out higher at second even after taking the penalty.
You cannot eyeball that. You have to look it up.
How ShowZone Handles Out of Position
We rebuilt our ratings around this.
Every card on ShowZone now carries a rating at every position it can physically play (removing obvious don'ts mentioned above) — not just its primary and secondaries. The penalty is already baked in, so the number you see at a position is the number you'd actually get if you put him there.
You'll see two labels on those ratings:
- SEC — a listed secondary position, small penalty
- OOP — out of position, penalty applied
Where to find it:
- Player pages — every position that card can realistically fill, rated and labeled
- Top 25 rankings — flip on Include out of position to see who else could fill a spot
- Players table — sort by any position, toggle OOP candidates in or out
- Compare — put a card at a different position and watch the individual attributes adjust
- Team Builder — toggle Consider out of position and the optimizer will use OOP placements when they genuinely produce a better team
That last one matters. Team Builder doesn't just allow out-of-position moves — it weighs the defensive cost against the offensive gain, and only makes the move when the math says it's worth it.
Out-of-position consideration is off by default everywhere. Nothing changes about your existing rankings or saved rosters unless you turn it on.
TL;DR
- Out of position only affects Fielding, Reactions and Arm Accuracy. Hitting never changes.
- Arm Strength, Speed, Blocking and Pop Time never change either.
- Penalties round down, so they're mild for elite defenders and devastating for weak ones.
- Moving down the defensive spectrum is cheap. Moving up is expensive.
- Catcher is closed. Pitchers can't play the field or DH unless they're two-way.
- A penalized rating at an easy position often beats a clean rating at a hard one — look it up instead of guessing.
Every card on ShowZone is now rated at every position it can play, with the penalty already applied. Turn on out of position in Team Builder and let it find the alignment you wouldn't have thought to try.