I'm an American with only the vaguest idea of what goes on in a baseball game. That has no effect at all on the language you're spuriously complaining about; it reads as "Can the guy who applied for [a position] play [a different position] instead? What about [a third position]?" No analogy is being drawn to the actual requirements of baseball positions -- those are just names. To understand the sentence as written, the only requirement is that you recognize that "pitcher" is a different word than "first base".
Perhaps you just like feeling indignant?