Interesting result from Baseball Prospectus today: Dan Fox's has ranked all fielders from 1957-2007 using his new fielding stat, SFR. The top three second basemen are all Athletics:

Name                Span         Balls     SFR    Rate
Dick Green         1963-1974      4281   102.0    1.18
Mark Ellis         2002-2007      2680    67.7    1.18
Mike Gallego       1986-1997      2117    50.5    1.16
Mark Lemke         1988-1998      3602    90.2    1.15
Jose Oquendo       1986-1995      2473    45.2    1.11

That's highly unusual. Green, Ellis and Gallego are/were all fantastic fielders, but it makes you wonder if there's some kind of hidden park factor going on here. Which would make sense if we were talking about first or third basemen with all the foul territory for popups (Eric Chavez is third amongst third basemen behind Brooks Robinson and Jim Davenport), but I doubt second basemen catch enough foul popups to make any difference here.

Maybe the first basemen play a step closer to the lines in Oakland in order to cover the foul territory? That would turn more balls that can normally be taken by either but are typically cut off by the first baseman into the responsibility of the second baseman alone. I dunno, that's just a guess, though.

I wonder what would happen to those rankings if you split them home/road?

And speaking of road:

Athletics at Toronto, 4:07pm