Fan vs. PECOTA Projections

[RShack]

Whether he could have adapted to another type of defense by pitching differently is another question, and one that can't really be answered without a time machine.

I agree with this.

[Frobby]

Welcome to my world, Baltimoron. I felt the same way about LH until I really looked at the numbers.

As for some of the other stuff. Yes, it is a very small sample size. Having said that, comparing it to Jay Gibbons hitting .400 over a short time span is a terrible analogy. Why? Because there is absolutely no reason to believe Jay Gibbons could ever hit .400 while there is every reason to believe LH is a very good defensive SS.

* * *

One other thing. If you are going to compare his MiLB stats to his MLB stats, at least try to compare apples to apples. You compared his minor league RFg (Range Factor based on games played) to his MLB RF9 (Ranged Factor based on innings played). There really is a big difference. His MiLB RFg – 4.28. His MLB RFg – 3.61. (As a point of comparison, Pena was 4.42 vice 4.00.) Maybe he wasn’t playing way above his head after all.

OK, maybe I exaggerated, but I don't think the analogy was "terrible." If LH has a zone rating of .923 next year or a range factor of 5.37 I will eat my hat.

I wasn't sure whether RF/g in the minors was calculated differently than RF in the majors, so thanks for pointing that out. I'm still not buying the idea that he is some super-fielder. Brandon Fahey had an RF/9 of 4.55 in 2005 at Bowie, compared to Hernandez's 4.28 this year. We all know that RF has its flaws as calculated at the major league level, and the way they do it in the minors, it's even worse, but that's all we have to go on to measure minor league range.

One last comment about sample size. Last year I kept monthly defensive stats on all the Oriole players, and there was drastic variation in their range stats (as measureed by RF or ZR) from one month to the next. I don't have those figures with me, but Tejada's numbers were off-the-charts bad in April and off-the-charts good in May. And each of those monthly samples those were BIGGER samples (about twice the size ) of the total sample we have for Hernandez.

I'm not disputing that Hernandez is more likely than not to be an above average defensive SS. And I guess his chances of being one of the best 2 or 3 defensive shortstops in all of baseball are better than the chances of Jay Gibbons hitting .400. But I'd still say Hernandez's chances are only about 1%.

[Lucky Jim]

OK, maybe I exaggerated, but I don't think the analogy was "terrible." If LH has a zone rating of .923 next year or a range factor of 5.37 I will eat my hat.

I wasn't sure whether RF/g in the minors was calculated differently than RF in the majors, so thanks for pointing that out. I'm still not buying the idea that he is some super-fielder. Brandon Fahey had an RF/9 of 4.55 in 2005 at Bowie, compared to Hernandez's 4.28 this year. We all know that RF has its flaws as calculated at the major league level, and the way they do it in the minors, it's even worse, but that's all we have to go on to measure minor league range.

One last comment about sample size. Last year I kept monthly defensive stats on all the Oriole players, and there was drastic variation in their range stats (as measureed by RF or ZR) from one month to the next. I don't have those figures with me, but Tejada's numbers were off-the-charts bad in April and off-the-charts good in May. And each of those monthly samples those were BIGGER samples (about twice the size ) of the total sample we have for Hernandez.

I'm not disputing that Hernandez is more likely than not to be an above average defensive SS. And I guess his chances of being one of the best 2 or 3 defensive shortstops in all of baseball are better than the chances of Jay Gibbons hitting .400. But I'd still say Hernandez's chances are only about 1%.

Jay Gibbons is going to make you eat those words, Frobby!

[Frobby]

The simple fact of the matter is that people routinely use sabremetrics as an excuse for saying dumb stuff. The current stat-of-the art of sabremetrics has given people ready access to all kinds of basis for making knee-jerk reactions about players based solely on offense, which is exactly what routinely happens. Meanwhile, the dearth of useful summary data about defense means that people underestimate D as an everyday matter. I'm not blaming sabermetrics for being imperfect, it's just in whatever its current stage of development is, that's all. But claiming its net everyday effect is accurate is demonstrably not true. Nor am I blaming all the serious people who work really hard at using numbers properly. Figuring out what D is worth is not easy, and the best methods seem to rely on direct human observation (which ain't all that different in principle from scouting, really). But not everybody works hard at it. It's certainly not most people who claim that they're so-very-SABRE in their outlook. For example, how many people said that LH was the "worst player in baseball"? Lots. Shall we go back and look at exactly who said stuff like that, and see what justification they used jumping to that conclusion?

The problem is that it's *easy* to get meaningful stat-based info about offense. In comparison, it's a royal pain the butt to get meaningful stat-based info about defense. What we need is a way to track +/- plays in an ongoing way throughout the season just as easily as we can track OBP and SLG. Until we have that, stat-based info is likely to be used to overvalue offense and undervalue D. If you don't think that's a true statement, how is it not true?

It is true, and I agree with everything you say here.

[Lucky Jim]

Well, it seems pretty clear to me that sabremetrics is incorrect at lowering the general perception of the important of D. I'm about 99.999% sure that Win Shares is completely wrong about it for individual good-D guys. But I don't think they're *trying* to lower it, it happens by accident simply because they don't have nice neat little events to record. That makes an absolutely huge difference. When it comes to hitting, we've got numbers about a zillion details, so once you figure out what you wanna know, it's just a matter of doing a db search and plugging some formulas into your spreadsheet. For D, it's not nearly so easy to just find any numbers that tell us what we want to know.

Personally, I believe the whole thing about +/- plays makes sense, but it's pretty new, plus you just can't go to any website and find that stuff. So, we end up with things like lists of the most + plays for 3 years (for just a few guys) without any mention of opportunities. Doing that is exactly the same thing as counting a batter's hits (or dingers, or total bases, or whatever) without even considering AB's. How crazy is that? But it's exactly the same thing. For a fielder, Total Chances and Innings-at-position are kinda like AB's. They're not exactly the same as AB's, but they're not exactly different either. Look around and see how many popular sites handle TC and Innings-at-position as part of their primary stat-set. Some of them don't have it anywhere. And sometimes those things are found they're in the secondary list of fielding stats, not the main one. Can you imagine going to a site that has player stats and having to nose around to see if-and-where they might have a column for AB's?

I don't think it's at all true that people are discounting D for good reasons. Re-read what has just been said about Brooks, Belanger, and Blair. None of them were great hitters, but each one of them made a huge difference. I think undervaluing D happens mainly by accident, simply because stat guys like to play with stats, and for D they just don't them to play with. The more I nose around about this, the more I'm convinced of what I said before: this is just another case of "whatever gets measured easiest-and-first gets way over-valued". That's what happens whenever people begin trying to be scientific about measuring performance. AFAIK, under-valuing D is just another example of that basic phenomenon.

I've been reading a pretty interesting book about the birth of quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle...which got me thinking, in a general way, about sabermetric analysis. And how our methods of measuring performance skewed our analysis of baseball. By which I mean we began to - as you say - devalue defense. And we've been doing that for a while now. But, in a classic Heisenbergian "Uncertainty Principle" kind of way, the game itself changed due to our methods of measuring it.

I think this is last part is absolutely true. I mean, it's understandable. But it also seems pretty likely.

[Baltimoron]

I've been reading a pretty interesting book about the birth of quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle...which got me thinking, in a general way, about sabermetric analysis. And how our methods of measuring performance skewed our analysis of baseball. By which I mean we began to - as you say - devalue defense. And we've been doing that for a while now. But, in a classic Heisenbergian "Uncertainty Principle" kind of way, the game itself changed due to our methods of measuring it.

I think this is last part is absolutely true. I mean, it's understandable. But it also seems pretty likely.

Before sabermetrics it was HR, rbi and average. Maybe errors in a superficial attempt to look at D.

Saber has done a whole lot more to fine tune our understanding of offense, but it did nothing to change its importance- offense was largely what it was in terms of player value.

Saber has if anything, brought to the forefront the importance of D, by providing a means of measuring what was previously a subjective endeavor.

--

What Saber may have enlightened and what Front Offices have embraced are not co-extensive.

[Lucky Jim]

Before sabermetrics it was HR, rbi and average. Maybe errors in a superficial attempt to look at D.

Saber has done a whole lot more to fine tune our understanding of offense, but it did nothing to change its importance- offense was largely what it was in terms of player value.

Saber has if anything, brought to the forefront the importance of D, by providing a means of measuring what was previously a subjective endeavor.

--

What Saber may have enlightened and what Front Offices have embraced are not co-extensive.

Perhaps - I mean, this is all just spitballing...and I'm not knocking Saber, in the least.

[Baltimoron]

The problem is that it's *easy* to get meaningful stat-based info about offense. In comparison, it's a royal pain the butt to get meaningful stat-based info about defense. What we need is a way to track +/- plays in an ongoing way throughout the season just as easily as we can track OBP and SLG. Until we have that, stat-based info is likely to be used to overvalue offense and undervalue D. If you don't think that's a true statement, how is it not true?

What is +/-? Its plays above or below average. But what is average? Whatever happened that year. See the problem. The average changes every day. A bigger issue is sample size and reliability.

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That said, the basic raw inputs for +/- are published by the Hardball Times about 1/3rd or so into the season (RZR, OOZ), and from that you could do a plays above or below average (it often pops up in blogs as runs above/below average as of date x).

So we do have a very good defensive stat published daily. It was in fact cited A LOT on this site this past season.

-----

Your last statement is wrong because you assume that in the absence of a real time defensive measure we undervalue defense.*

Why can't we overvalue it?

Why do we need inherently unreliable sample sizes to assess value. Why can't we know A-rod is a good hitter because he is, and the same of Adam Everett with the glove.

* if your point is really about how a stat is likely to be used , I can't help the fact that people are dumb or impatient or ignorant or whatever and won't look at D. But the notion that that is somehow any different than it ever was is silly. Talking value with a casual fan is almost always abut their triple crown line, although some other stuff has crept in like OBP.

[RShack]

I've been reading a pretty interesting book about the birth of quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle...which got me thinking, in a general way, about sabermetric analysis. And how our methods of measuring performance skewed our analysis of baseball. By which I mean we began to - as you say - devalue defense. And we've been doing that for a while now. But, in a classic Heisenbergian "Uncertainty Principle" kind of way, the game itself changed due to our methods of measuring it.

You just said 2 things. I agree with the first one (about how measurement has skewed our analysis). As for the second one (about how that has changed the game), I kinda-do and kinda-don't agree.

For those who might not know, the Heisenberg Principle comes from physics. They were trying to figure out the exact location-and-path of electrons, and they discovered that just looking at them changed the path they take (because of how light works, and other arcane stuff that nobody understands except physics-people). Which makes it kinda hard to be certain about your measurements of the thing you're trying to measure. Most of the time you hear the Heisenberg Principle mentioned, it's about a more general point: the "observer effect", which says (more or less) that sometimes you can't study a phenomenon "objectively" because the very act of observing the phenomena can change the very phenomenon you're trying to observe.

The newer methods for judging both actual baseball performance and potential baseball performance (which are the two main purposes of trying to measuring it) has considerably changed how we value things, and in ways that include both pro's and con's. It's probably inevitable that there are both pro's and con's to it, just because that's how "change" usually works. But, as with anything else that promises "progress", some folks don't like to hear about the con's of it, and they get steamed when you point them out. For people who would label themselves as "casual fans", I don't think it's had much impact either way. But for many people who think of themselves as "students of the game", and for how baseball organizations actually work, I think there's no doubt that there's both pro's and con's to it.

• About the fans: The whole story of how LH as been angrily-dissed around here is an example of the downside of it. Here's a kid who showed up and did better than anybody thought, and who was about the only single pleasant surprise of the whole second-half of the season. But instead of people being glad about an O's kid taking his big chance and doing great, people got *mad* at him. How crazy is that? As fans, we're supposed to root like crazy for any kid who gets his chance and does great. But evidently this doesn't apply when that kid challenges the prevailing stat-based dogma. When the kid does that, he becomes the enemy, and people start calling him the "worst player in baseball". IMO, that's kinda sick. So, what happened was that people quit thinking and instead turned LH into another bandwagon issue, one that boiled down to, "Oh, look, the FO and DT are being stupid! We're so much smarter than them, because we know how to look-up somebody's OPS number on the internet!"

  .

  In the past, the idea of a good-glove light-hitting good-D SS was NBFD. But now it's suddenly a major catastrophe. I don't know if we even have a way to tell how much of the shift of priorty away from SS-D at is a "better assessment of SS value" vs. "just another baseball fad". I truly don't know if we know how to answer that question in a full and complete way. Regardless of that, many of the things said around here (not just about LH but also about guys like Belanger and Aparicio throughout the many LH-related threads) have been filled with a large amount of fad-driven nonsense. I'm in no way saying that the fad-aspect is the *fault* of Sabre-stuff (I do not believe that). But Sabre-stuff is 100% of what enables and drives the rationale behind the nonsense. The core of it is that stats represent offense way-better and way-more-accessibly than they represent defense. That's nobody's fault, it's just how it is.

  But as a result of that pretty-obvious fact, many folks who use stats as a their primary touchstone tend to insist that offense is "The Overriding Consideration", while D is "Just Small Potatoes" in comparison. It's become a matter of reflexive dogma, to the point where people were getting *mad* about LH just because the idea of him playing SS challenged that dogma. Some people were about ready to burn him at the stake, just like the Salem witches. And throughout all of that, there was *no* consideration of RC vs. DR, no assessment of any kind about the actual concrete value of preventing runs vs. scoring runs, there was *none* of that, really, until 1970 and I starting talking about it with each other. Instead, there was mostly mass hysteria about LH, and it was simply because he challenges the idea that "it's gotta be offense-first, all the time, nomatter what, even at the most important defensive positions". The big exception was some people saying that, if you were loaded with bats everywhere else, you could have a good-D SS on your way to the WS. Now, that was my all-time favorite part: while a no-hit, good-D SS might be fine for the World Champions, he'd be way-too-crappy to deserve a place in the lineup for the last-place rebuilding-Orioles! (Hee-hee. That still cracks me up, even now ;-)

  .

• About how baseball organizations operate for the worse: I heard a big dose of that just yesterday, listening to Kennedy-and-Dibble on XM. It started becaue they had some guy on who was hyping some benefit-event to raise money for old baseball scouts who have no pension, no insurance, no anything, and who are in dire straights. And, since MLB is awash in bazillions of dollars but won't give the old scouts a nickel, they're trying to get regular people to chip in to help them out. As part of the discussion, they were talking about a few of the old scouts in particular, including 4 or 5 who both Kennedy and Dibble agreed belonged in the HOF but who don't stand a prayer because there's no way for scouts to get in. (Apparently, scouts are not a HOF-recognized category of baseball-people.) So, there were various good stories about these famous old scouts (guys who I never heard of), and the super-famous players they found, and how they found them, and how they kept the guys they found secret from competing scouts, and so on.

  Then, after that, some caller asked them what their opinion was about the old scout-based method of judging talent vs. the new Sabre-based methods of judging talent, and about whether the stat-stuff had squeezed a bunch of good scouts out the door. That's when they got *really* cranked up. They said that, of course using stats in a better way is a great thing, no doubt about it. The trouble they had with it was that it has also caused things to get way out of whack, to the point where much of the goodness of traditional scouting has been seriously ignored and dissed *within* MLB. They gave a few examples:

  .

  • They said that one of those great HOF-calibre scouts they were talking about spent his last few years with the Dodgers being completely ignored because everybody was trusting stat-sheets instead of his opinion. The FO guys were looking at radar-gun-times and stop-watch-times and concluding that some kid sucked, and they just blew off the HOF scout who was telling them that the kid was special, that the kid had talent and ability that just doesn't show up yet if you try to measure it with numbers. According to Kennedy-and-Dibble, it wasn't a disagreement about a particular kid, it was that the whole organization just blew the opinions of guys like him for years because those opinions weren't based on "objective" numbers.

    .

  • Kennedy says that when he was managing the Red Sox (or shortly thereafter, I forget), the Red Sox bought their scouts TV's so they could stay at home and watch games without traveling. This idea made everybody go berserk, because to scout right, you gotta be there, at the game, and paying attention hard. But the fad was to de-emphasize subjective opinion of knowledgable people to the point where they didn't even want to send them to the ballgames, they wanted them to stay home and watch it on TV. Meanwhile, the guys in the FO were staring at stat-sheets. (Note: this is before the Theo-era in BOS.)

    .

  • This led to more stories about how somebody (I forget who, but he was an old baseball exec) would have a fit if he saw his scouts sitting with other scouts behind home plate, leaning back and BS'ing with each other. He wanted his scouts on the edge of their seats, paying attention to Actual Baseball, and not kibbutzing with the enemy. Evidently, according to them, scouting has become a club, and all the scouts BS with each other and share info with each other. That way, they don't have to work as hard. This is in strong contrast to how it used to be, when scouts kept their opinions secret from the competition. But now, since everybody has the same stats, they figure it's fine for everybody to have the same scouting reports.

So, I think we need to distinguish between what Sabre-stuff has contributed and the accidental side-effects that it's had. I have no doubt whatsoever that it's contributed good stuff about hitting and pitching. I am 100% confident about that. But it has also had unfortunate side effects. Among these are the devaluing of D and the devaluing of scouting. The devaluing of scouting is in no way the fault of Sabre-stuff. It's an accidental side-effect that decent Sabre-people would never have wanted. As for the devaluing of D, I think that maybe the Sabre-folks do share some responisbility about that, simply because they should've had enough sense to warn people about it. They should have been constantly saying, "We don't know how to do this right, so you better look out! Our measures of O are way-better than our measures of D, so be careful about devaluing D." AFAIK, they didn't say that. But I could be wrong.

As for your second point, about whether this has changed the game, I think the right answer is "yes and no". It's changed how things are done in the game, and not necessarily for the better. But it hasn't changed baseball. A truly great-glove SS is still worth his weight in gold, and the fact that some stat-minded folks can't see it doesn't change that at all. All it means is that they undervalue D, it doesn't mean that D is worth less duing an Actual Ballgame or an Actual Baseball Season.

As for Fantasy Baseball, I just don't know. Since Fantasy Baseball is based on stats, my guess would be that D doesn't count for much there, but I'm just guessing about that. Maybe somebody who knows more about Fantasy Baseball than I do could comment on that.

[RShack]

Before sabermetrics it was HR, rbi and average. Maybe errors in a superficial attempt to look at D.

Among fans, sure. But baseball didn't necessarily operate on that basis. When the O's had perennial AS, perennial GG, and future HOF'er Aparicio, and they decided to trade him to make room for Belanger, it wasn't because of counting E's. It was because they had guys watching him play who said, "Believe it or not, this skinny kid Belanger is way-better than even Aparicio is." That wasn't because of counting E's, it was because of watching them play baseball. At the time, it was a hard pill to swallow. When they got rid of Aparicio to make room for Belanger, a big part of the fanbase thought they were nuts. But after a while they didn't.

Saber has done a whole lot more to fine tune our understanding of offense, but it did nothing to change its importance- offense was largely what it was in terms of player value.

That's just not true. It's the opposite of true.

Before Sabre, the general formula was "O at the corners, D up the middle."

Now, the general formula has become "O everywhere, no matter what."

Big difference, and the change is not necessarily correct either.

Just ask Bill James about his Win Shares for Adam Everett vs. his closer-look at Adam Everett.

Saber has if anything, brought to the forefront the importance of D, by providing a means of measuring what was previously a subjective endeavor.

I don't see how you can possibly say that, except as a statement of absolute religious faith in stats. I think it's pretty clear that D has become devalued and that the most commonly-used Sabre data-points devalue it. But it's not by design, it's completely by accident: it's mainly because stats are mostly about O and P. So D just isn't on the stat-radar-screen nearly as much as O is.

Saying that stats have "brought to the forefront the importance of D" seems completely 100% goofy to me. I think the exact opposite is true. The fact that some serious stat-guys are *trying* to treat D properly doesn't mean that Sabre has actually had that effect. It's pretty clear that it's had the opposite effect. Just look at Win Shares. The serious guys who are trying to treat D properly have evidently decided that you *can't* use just-stats to do it. This is evident in the fact that they pay observers to watch each game and plot what zones on the field the balls actually go to vs. what the defender does with it. That's just doing what scouts do, but keeping a systematic record of it, that's all. It's the blurring-together of scouting with stats, because they know by now that stats-by-themselves can't do it when it comes to D.

What Saber may have enlightened and what Front Offices have embraced are not co-extensive.

I don't know why people keep saying that Sabre-fans are enlightened and FO's are dopes who ignore it. Seems like snobbery to me. Plus it's wrong: some clubs have been dopes by staring at stat-sheets too much, while cutting back on scouting. While that's not Sabre's fault, it is nonetheless an unintended negative consequence of Sabre's impact.

To be clear: I am *not* dissing Sabre. I think stats are great. When I was building models of student performance, I kept telling the CS geeks Bill James stories. (Most of them looked at me like I was nuts because they didn't know baseball. But some of them started going to Braves games ;-)

Here's the big thing that some people keep missing: You have to keep them *in perspective*, and that's what a lot of folks are just not doing. Instead, they treat stats like it's some dang cookbook, which is a wrong thing to do with them, at least until you have a good model built. Which we don't. The fact that we don't is nobody's fault. Rather, it's 100% because Sabre is trying to do something that is way-harder than some people seem to realize. This is not an easy problem, it's an incredibly hard problem. Of the three basic parts, D is the hardest one.

The whole point is that Sabre is a work in progress: it's not a finished job. The current state of it's impact clearly undervalues-D. It's not anybody's fault, it just is what it is. If a guy is building a house, but he's not done yet and so there's no roof on it, and therefore it gets wet inside when it rains, that doesn't mean the guy is a bad housebuilder. It just means he's not done yet, that's all. Same thing here: Sabre's not done yet, so the roof isn't on the house... and a lot of fan-opinions about the value of D are soaking-sopping wet ;-)

[Baltimoron]

That's just not true. It's the opposite of true.

Before Sabre, the general formula was "O at the corners, D up the middle."

Now, the general formula has become "O everywhere, no matter what."

Big difference, and the change is not necessarily correct either.

Just ask Bill James about his Win Shares for Adam Everett vs. his closer-look at Adam Everett.

You can't keep moving the target.

Before saber we had triple crown stats and subjective assessments of D (thus not widely available and subject to credibility and gradation concerns).

Saber has allowed us greater precision in assessing offense and led to the disbursement of reasonably accurate measures of a player's defensive contributions.

Saber didn't make offense more prevalent, PEDS, small parks, and the love of the home run and more scoring did.

I'm not sure if I agree with your characterizations of what was and now is value, other than to say they are commonly held. But that doesn't mean they are right.

[RShack]

You can't keep moving the target.

What target am I moving? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just not sure what you mean.

Look, I think the good Sabre-stuff is way-cool, I'm not dissing it in anyway. I just think you're making claims about Sabre and D that just aren't justified. The current "state of the art" when it comes to giving fans good, meaningful, and trustworthy summary data-points about D just isn't good. It's just not. That's not saying it won't be one day, but it's not there yet. It's just not.

What appears to be the best one is Top Secret, and only a tiny subset of findings get released to the public. (I'm not dissing the guy, presumably he does that so he can sell the info to MLB to pay for all the guys he's got scoring D-plays). The bottom line is that it's a royal pain to try to guestimate D-value, and even after you do a bunch of work, you're still wrong. Meanwhile, with offense, you just look at any of a zillion web sites and find out what you want to know. The difference is like night and day.

[Boy Howdy]

I posted something like this over the summer, and it was reaffirmed this fall by Julio Lugo & company.

Other than Derek Jeter and a fluke season from David (career 89 OPS+) Eckstein, every World Series champion since the O's moved into Camden Yards employed a below average offensive shortstop...often by a wide margin.

83 - Manny Lee (1992)

99 - Tony Fernandez (1993)

31 - Rafael Belliard (1995) & in the regular season, Jeff Blauser (73)

101 - Derek Jeter (1996)

80 - Edgar Renteria (1997)

127 - Jeter (1998)

153 - Jeter (1999)

128 - Jeter (2000)

64 - Tony Womack (2001)

101 - David Eckstein (2002)

96 - Alex Gonzalez (2003)

74 - Orlando Cabrera (2004)

85 - Juan Uribe (2005)

81 - Eckstein (2006)

65 - Julio Lugo (2007)

[square634]

I posted something like this over the summer, and it was reaffirmed this fall by Julio Lugo & company.

Other than Derek Jeter and a fluke season from David (career 89 OPS+) Eckstein, every World Series champion since the O's moved into Camden Yards employed a below average offensive shortstop...often by a wide margin.

83 - Manny Lee (1992)

99 - Tony Fernandez (1993)

31 - Rafael Belliard (1995) & in the regular season, Jeff Blauser (73)

101 - Derek Jeter (1996)

80 - Edgar Renteria (1997)

127 - Jeter (1998)

153 - Jeter (1999)

128 - Jeter (2000)

64 - Tony Womack (2001)

101 - David Eckstein (2002)

96 - Alex Gonzalez (2003)

74 - Orlando Cabrera (2004)

85 - Juan Uribe (2005)

81 - Eckstein (2006)

65 - Julio Lugo (2007)

Is OPS+ position adjusted? I don't think it is. So while 100 OPS+ is league average, that is not the same thing as league average for a shortstop.

[Sports Guy]

I posted something like this over the summer, and it was reaffirmed this fall by Julio Lugo & company.

Other than Derek Jeter and a fluke season from David (career 89 OPS+) Eckstein, every World Series champion since the O's moved into Camden Yards employed a below average offensive shortstop...often by a wide margin.

83 - Manny Lee (1992)

99 - Tony Fernandez (1993)

31 - Rafael Belliard (1995) & in the regular season, Jeff Blauser (73)

101 - Derek Jeter (1996)

80 - Edgar Renteria (1997)

127 - Jeter (1998)

153 - Jeter (1999)

128 - Jeter (2000)

64 - Tony Womack (2001)

101 - David Eckstein (2002)

96 - Alex Gonzalez (2003)

74 - Orlando Cabrera (2004)

85 - Juan Uribe (2005)

81 - Eckstein (2006)

65 - Julio Lugo (2007)

THis has been brought up before...Not sure what relevance it has to the Orioles, their current situation and how a no hit, all field SS fits on a team with a ton of issues.

Or are you passing along info for the hell of it?