Fan vs. PECOTA Projections

[RShack]

What kind of scouting and minor league defensive numbers are there for LH? I never realized he was that good last year - albeit a very small sample size. Was he always regarded as a silly good (like best around) SS?

AFAIK, we can't get the D-numbers we want about MiL guys. As for scouting reports, the ones I saw were very high on his D. Since I worked in ATL for a long time, I paid attention to the Braves, and everybody was all moon-y about him for the first couple years. His D was the main reason he was #7 in the non-crappy ATL system at a very young age (before they decided he couldn't hit). One of the reports somebody posted here described him as a "non-stop highlight reel".

Here's something I'm not sure about: I understand why we should be suspicious of small samples, especially when a new kid shows up from the bus leagues. I especially understand it about hitting. In addition to all the being-lucky stuff about hitting, hitters have to worry about pitchers figuring them out (and vice versa). But fielders don't have to worry about that, because they're not competing against anybody, really. They're mainly competing against the hit-ball, plus whatever might be wrong with the field. Fielders don't have any "natural enemies" like hitters and pitchers are for each other. Plus, ML ground-balls aren't any different than MiL ground balls, it's not like fielders face a tougher level of balls to catch just because they reach the bigs. If anything, the fields are better in ML ballparks, which helps the fielder. So, when it comes to this, I think there's prolly some reasonable bound on how suspicious you wanna be. If he shows he's got range, how phony can it be? I understand that maybe some GB's might have just kinda bounced at his glove, but he still had to get his glove in the way. And maybe he got away with blindly heaving a couple throws that ended up in the 1B-mitt by accident, but he still had to go get the dang ball to begin with. So, I don't see how the numbers can be totally discounted due to sample size. I can see how a small-sample could easily be unfair to guys who maybe didn't get a chance to demonstrate all the range they've got. But I don't see how the range-data can possibly fabricate a *ton* of range that's not there. That just doesn't make sense to me. A little maybe, I can see that, but I don't see how it can fabricate a *lot* of it. Do you?

[RShack]

I'm surprised at how well Belanger comes out on these metrics. I always thought he was a close second to Ozzie but a lot of this new data says that Blade out did the Wizard.

A big part of Belanger's problem was that, no matter how good he was, the whole Brooks-legend meant that, of the 2 left-side IF'ers, he was always 2nd-best. Being #2 out of 2 kinda interferes with being a legend. Another part was that he just showed up and went to work. He wasn't grumpy or sour, but he wasn't a big media darling either. Plus, he didn't do backflips ;-) Opposing managers sure hated him. Back then, it was very routine to read the paper and see quotes from opposing managers being grumpy about the game he stole from them the night before.

[RShack]

Did you all see this article on THT?

It is a look at yet another defensive metric. The great thing about this metric is that it gives us an ability to measure players back to 1956. The article inlcudes the top defensive players at each position by his system from 1956 to 1986. This is anothe +/- system. Keep in mind that since it ends at 1986, it doesn't include the last 10 years of Ozzie Smith's career. Orioles fans will like his rankings at 3B (Brooks by a wide margin), SS (Belanger, Aparicio top 2 spots), and CF (Paul Blair by a pretty comfortable margin).

How very cool. Great find.

He said he did it from '56 to '92. I wonder why he stopped there. Do we know if his ratings for everybody are available anywhere? I'd like to see how O's 2B-men ranked. There were lots of places where hit balls went to die. Some folks think Palmer was dumb for not K'ing more guys, but he didn't want to. He described his job as being one of "intentionally injuring my arm every 4th day, and then hoping it heals before the next start", and his goal was to get max-innings out of min-pitches. He figured his job was easier if he just got the Bad Guys to hit it somewhere. Those numbers help make his point-of-view more understandable.

As for Belanger: Aparacio was great and nobody was mad at him. But they got rid of him anyway, just to make room for Belanger. That alone could have been a clue ;-)

[DrungoHazewood]

Brooks was like 110 and the Blade like 70 runs better than the next closest fielder from 1956 to 1986:

OMG

That is absurd- the two best fielders over this three decade period (yes the math is goofy because careers get cut off but..), by a huge margin, playing on the same side of the infield.

I think this says a lot about how Jim Palmer was able to pitch 300 innings a year to an ERA+ of 125 with a strikeout rate of 5.04 per nine. It also explains why he's constantly on TV talking about pitching to contact - he could have thrown the ball up there in a slow pitch softball arc and kept his ERA around league average with that defense. I don't believe he quite gets the magnitude of difference between Brooks and Belanger, and two mortals.

[Frobby]

Sean Smith had Luis + 4 runs over 139 innings at SS in 2007.

Justin Inaz had LH +4.1 runs as a SS in 2007.

The problem, of course, is one of sample size, but each of these guys had him 4 runs above average in like 1/10th of a season at SS.

Given a fulltime SS plays 1300-1400 innings, Hernandez was on a pace in 2007, which if sustained, would make him the best defensive SS in baseball by a fair bit. That's sorta like saying the guy with 5 homes runs over his first 70 plate appearances will hit 50 - a lot can happen and the sample size is inherently unreliable.

So if Luis plays a little worse than he did last year in his short time at SS in 2007 over a full season in 2008, Adam Loewen will be the happiest guy on the planet and the Os would have a value at SS, even if he is really, really bad with the bat. Was his short stint reflective of how good he is with the glove?

There is no question that LH played absolutely great defense for 139 innings. But that sample size is so small that it means very little. It would be like getting excited if Jay Gibbons hit .400 over a 15-game stretch.

By the way, LH was quite the magician when he played in July, but he was kind of pedestrian when he returned in September. He made 3 errors for the Orioles, all of which were during his September stint. He had a .968 zone rating as of the end of July, but at the end of the year he had a ZR of .923, so that also slipped considerably (though still very good).

My personal opinion is that a lot of fans saw this guy make some really good plays in the 8 (!) games he started while Tejada was injured and decided he was Ozzie Smith, then selectively ignored the rather pedestrian defense he played in the 6 games he started in September (a lot of us had turned off their TV sets by then).

Looking at his minor league numbers, his career fielding percentage of .967 and his range factor of 4.28 over hundreds of games (compared to 5.37 in his short Baltimore stint) make me believe that LH is nothing more than a very solid defensive SS, who happened to play some very good defense when he first arrived and made a good but misleading impression.

[Frobby]

Brooks was like 110 and the Blade like 70 runs better than the next closest fielder from 1956 to 1986:

OMG

That is absurd- the two best fielders over this three decade period (yes the math is goofy because careers get cut off but..), by a huge margin, playing on the same side of the infield.

Not only that but Brooks saved the most outs of any player at any position by a wide margin, even though a third baseman gets less balls hit to him than a middle infielder does.

And look at Blair, too. Saved the most outs and had the biggest margin over the next person of any outfielder.

Think that it was just a matter of local bias that we think of these guys as three of the greatest fielders of all time? No way. And they were all playing at the exact same time. Those of us who got to watch those teams were very, very lucky.

By the way, Bobby Grich was no slouch, either.

[Lucky Jim]

I think this says a lot about how Jim Palmer was able to pitch 300 innings a year to an ERA+ of 125 with a strikeout rate of 5.04 per nine. It also explains why he's constantly on TV talking about pitching to contact - he could have thrown the ball up there in a slow pitch softball arc and kept his ERA around league average with that defense. I don't believe he quite gets the magnitude of difference between Brooks and Belanger, and two mortals.

Well, not to rehash an old conversation - while Palmer was aided by defense, he was still much better than his teammates at avoiding hits. The differential between he and other staff members between expected hits (based on peripherals) and actual hits wasn't in line with the rest of the Orioles staff.

[Hank Scorpio]

You're going to make SG's head explode.

[Gurgi]

The younger guys should cut us older guys some slack for loving the leather. We had some of the best defensive players in history. Sabermetrics may be correct in lowering the importance of defence as compared to hitting but I love me some D.

[RShack]

Sabermetrics may be correct in lowering the importance of defence as compared to hitting but I love me some D.

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.

[RShack]

I think this says a lot about how Jim Palmer was able to pitch 300 innings a year to an ERA+ of 125 with a strikeout rate of 5.04 per nine. It also explains why he's constantly on TV talking about pitching to contact - he could have thrown the ball up there in a slow pitch softball arc and kept his ERA around league average with that defense. I don't believe he quite gets the magnitude of difference between Brooks and Belanger, and two mortals.

My bet is that if Palmer had had a different level of D behind him, he would've pitched differently. I don't think it's mainly about him being lucky, I think it's mainly about him doing what the situation called for. He was smart enough to realize that he was a cog in a bigger machine, and he was good enough that he could adapt to the situation. That's not luck.

[DrungoHazewood]

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.

You're telling me that we just went through this whole 10+ page exercise, the result of which is the conclusion that Luis Hernandez just might be good enough defensively to justify the 2008 Baltimore Orioles playing him... and you're still going to say that sabermetrics undervalues defense? 1970 and Baltimoron have both used a whole lot of numbers (i.e. sabermetrics, in the sense you're using the term) to say that a great defensive shortstop might still be OK even if he's hitting .230 with no power, walks or speed. But you're still saying that isn't enough? Somehow there's still missing value here? You're suggesting that Adam Everett's 5.7 WARP3 in 2006, when he hit .239/.290/.352 in a league that hit .265/.334/.427, is undervaluing him?

Where do you think these fantastic ratings of Brooks, Belanger, and Blair came from? Certainly not old scouting reports. They're from sabermetric analysis of the available numbers.

I think you should quit while you're ahead.

[DrungoHazewood]

My bet is that if Palmer had had a different level of D behind him, he would've pitched differently. I don't think it's mainly about him being lucky, I think it's mainly about him doing what the situation called for. He was smart enough to realize that he was a cog in a bigger machine, and he was good enough that he could adapt to the situation. That's not luck.

Who said anything about luck? I said much of his success was do to the skill of his defense. I think that's become more and more clear as the data has been analyzed in more depth recently.

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.

[tywright]

You don't get much better defensively than the O's in 1969 thru 1971. Brooks, Blade, Davey Johnson, and Paul Blair...11 GG's combined with Belanger losing to Aparicio in 1970. And don't forget Jim Palmer was very good defensively and would have won more GG if Jim Kaat wasn't around.

[RShack]

Well, it seems pretty clear to me that sabremetrics is incorrect at lowering the general perception of the importance of D...

You're telling me that we just went through this whole 10+ page exercise, the result of which is the conclusion that Luis Hernandez just might be good enough defensively to justify the 2008 Baltimore Orioles playing him... and you're still going to say that sabermetrics undervalues defense?

[stuff deleted]

I think you should quit while you're ahead.

I think you should quit focusing on *parts* of my sentence and ignoring the rest of it. Look at the *whole* sentence, not just the one word that sets you off. You don't have to read the whole paragraph, just the whole sentence. (Although, in fairness, I'm the guy who highlighted that one word, but that was just in response to the prior post.)

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 for 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?