Jorge in Center

[Greg Pappas]

25 minutes ago, Aristotelian said:

They used McKenna to replace Santander which is a bigger upgrade. Unfortunately Jordan decided to hit it to RF. These things happen. It is way too early to declare Mateo a failure in CF. They are auditioning him for a backup role, nothing more. 

As for whether McKenna catches that ball, who knows. He dropped the pop up vs Boston and the message board was ready to get rid of him. I think McKenna makes it most of the time but I think Mateo probably does too. 

I feel that we shouldn't be "auditioning" in a pennant race.  It's failure of management, one of the few, to continue trotting Mateo on the field.  Let's be honest, how many games has his defense alone cost us the past couple of months?  It's frustrating that this has not been resolved.

[Frobby]

9 hours ago, Aristotelian said:

.780 xBA isn't routine.

xBA is not a good indicator of catch difficulty, because it doesn’t take into account where the ball was hit in relation to the positioning of the fielders.  It’s purely based on how hard the ball was hit and the launch angle.  

Catch probability is a much better indicator, but I’m having trouble finding it for that play.  

To me, I wouldn’t call it routine, or a catch that gets made 99% of the time.  But, I’d say it’s caught more often than not.  

[Frobby]

7 minutes ago, Greg Pappas said:

I feel that we shouldn't be "auditioning" in a pennant race.  

I think players get auditioned during pennant races all the time.  Heck, we just picked up a reliever that an inferior team had DFA.   

[Tony-OH]

9 hours ago, SilverRocket said:

xBA does not take direction into account and I really wish people would stop using it to talk about defensive plays.

I've been guilty myself at times at using XBA as an indicator of difficulty of a play, but you are correct, it's not a perfect indicator at all. Really, you have to wait until the catch probability is available in the outfielder's defense "stats" within savant to know fully.

Mateo does not have any outfield stats available yet so that effort last not is not available.

[Tony-OH]

9 minutes ago, Frobby said:

xBA is not a good indicator of catch difficulty, because it doesn’t take into account where the ball was hit in relation to the positioning of the fielders.  It’s purely based on how hard the ball was hit and the launch angle.  

Catch probability is a much better indicator, but I’m having trouble finding it for that play.  

To me, I wouldn’t call it routine, or a catch that gets made 99% of the time.  But, I’d say it’s caught more often than not.  

Whoops, I made the classic mistake of not reading through the thread all the way before posting. I said the same thing basically on using catch percentage vice xBA.

As for the catch, Mateo turned the wrong way, had to take his eyes totally off the ball by turning the other way, slowed down a bit, then jumped when he didn't have to and the ball deflected off the bottom of his glove. 

There is little doubt to me the competent major league center fielder catches that ball 99% of the time. 

Saying all that, that was an absolutely awful 1-2 pitch by Bautista. Can't throw a center cut fastball to a hitter like Alvarez and considering he was the tie run, and runners were at 1st and 2nd, I'm not thrilled with that pitch call by McCann. I think you got to throw a couple of splits, even if that pitch was not very good last night. Heck, maybe even a slider down and under the hands to try and get a chase. If you you throw a fastball in that situation it has to be at the top or out of the zone up.

Back to Mateo in CF though. I'm not thrilled with him being there vs McKenna especially late in games. I understand trying to make him more versatile, and I even understand trying to keep that speed and positional versatility on the roster for the playoffs, but McKenna is a league average center fielder and in games against good teams like Houston, your pitchers deserve the best defense in key positions and right now, McKenna is the best defensive CF on the roster with Mullins on the IL.

[Frobby]

15 minutes ago, Tony-OH said:

Whoops, I made the classic mistake of not reading through the thread all the way before posting. I said the same thing basically on using catch percentage vice xBA.

As an aside, i wish Baseball Savant would make catch probability just as accessible as xBA in its game feeds.  There doesn’t seem to be any reason they couldn’t.  It’s really hard to get catch probability data for a specific play.

[Tony-OH]

42 minutes ago, Frobby said:

As an aside, I wish Baseball Savant would make catch probability just as accessible as xBA in its game feeds.  There doesn’t seem to be any reason they couldn’t.  It’s really hard to get catch probability data for a specific play.

I agree. Same with MPHs on throws.

I'm not sure why they choose to limit certain data unless it's because the data is skewed sometimes with errors and they don't want people to see the errors in real time.

[Sports Guy]

 

[G54377]

It's extremely ironic that a guy who's on the team almost exclusively due to his defense has cost this team what, like 4 games in the 9th inning DUE to bad defensive plays?

[Frobby]

On 8/9/2023 at 8:13 AM, Tony-OH said:

I've been guilty myself at times at using XBA as an indicator of difficulty of a play, but you are correct, it's not a perfect indicator at all. Really, you have to wait until the catch probability is available in the outfielder's defense "stats" within savant to know fully.

Mateo does not have any outfield stats available yet so that effort last not is not available.

The stats are up now on Mateo’s two defensive plays from Tuesday.  The catch he made at the fence was rated a 90% catch probability.  The one he didn’t catch in the 9th inning was rated 95%.   

[CaptainRedbeard]

5 minutes ago, Frobby said:

The stats are up now on Mateo’s two defensive plays from Tuesday.  The catch he made at the fence was rated a 90% catch probability.  The one he didn’t catch in the 9th inning was rated 95%.   

Do Statcast take into account the difficulty of plays at/over the wall, or is it a binary system where it’s 0% if in home run territory and otherwise the % is based solely on the player’s position at the time of the swing?  Those seem like the right percentages for getting to both balls, but I would think the difficulty of actually making the catch when running into the wall would lower them more than that, even for experienced CF. 

[Frobby]

6 minutes ago, CaptainRedbeard said:

Do Statcast take into account the difficulty of plays at/over the wall, or is it a binary system where it’s 0% if in home run territory and otherwise the % is based solely on the player’s position at the time of the swing?  Those seem like the right percentages for getting to both balls, but I would think the difficulty of actually making the catch when running into the wall would lower them more than that, even for experienced CF. 

I do not think it takes walls into account and agree that plays at the wall are more difficult than the “average” play with that hang time and distance.  

[Pickles]

Just now, Frobby said:

I do not think it takes walls into account and agree that plays at the wall are more difficult than the “average” play with that hang time and distance.  

A probability system that doesn't take into account a major factor sounds pretty garbage to me.

[CaptainRedbeard]

9 minutes ago, Frobby said:

I do not think it takes walls into account and agree that plays at the wall are more difficult than the “average” play with that hang time and distance.  

That makes more sense, although it doesn’t make the percentages all that helpful in this instance. Mateo did get to the second ball despite his hilariously bad route. He may have ended up just making a routine play look hard if he wasn’t dealing with the wall. Which still does not reflect well on his ability to play CF.  

[Alasdaire]

6 minutes ago, CaptainRedbeard said:

That makes more sense, although it doesn’t make the percentages all that helpful in this instance. Mateo did get to the second ball despite his hilariously bad route. He may have ended up just making a routine play look hard if he wasn’t dealing with the wall. Which still does not reflect well on his ability to play CF.  

I don't think any advanced fielding statistic should be taken too literally. They might be useful as a relative indicator, ie comparing one play to another. But the actual output being a probability shouldn't be interpreted in absolute terms imo.