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Educating Buster

Just as often, however, this is kind of how the Gold Glove voting played out, in a roomful of coaches (I'm keeping names out of it, to protect the innocent and guilty):

Coach 1: "First base … hmmm … who are the best guys at first base?"
Coach 2: "That guy for the team we just played is pretty good."

Coach 1: "Yeah, you're right. Can't throw worth a damn, but he can pick it."
Coach 2: "What about [Candidate X]?"

Multiple coaches, all at once: "Yeah, he's a great choice."

And then, many times, the coaches on the same team would all vote for the same guy, in a block vote, without considering other players.

Other statistical measures depend on an evaluator sitting in the press box effectively gauging whether a fielder might have/should have reached a ball, and there are many problems with this system, as well.

How do you determine how hard a ball was hit? Is gauging a hard-hit ball or really hard-hit ball or medium hard not a subjective measure? I'd bet that if you were to ask 10 different stringers to evaluate the same game, there would be lots of differences in how they gauge such information as how hard a ball was hit, and even where a ball was hit or whether a ball was a line drive or fly ball, etc.

• Stringers log baseball games. In some cases, stringers are at ballparks, but in many cases games are watched on video, allowing the stringer to replay games and make sure they log each play correctly.


• When a ball is hit, the stringer (by the way, stringer is an old newspaper term for a freelance journalist; I don't know why it's used for baseball fans who like to track ballgames) records it as a certain type: ground ball, fly ball, line drive or bunt. In 2006, Baseball Info Solutions added another category called "fliner" (batted balls that are in between fly balls and line drives and hard to categorize). This is certainly the most subjective part of the process.


• Stringers also track where the ball landed. Different companies have different ways of tracking this info. I believe STATS Inc. uses zones, while BIS uses coordinates based on charts they have of every ballpark. This isn't really subjective information, though you can certainly debate whether one approach is better than another.


• Finally, they classify how hard every batted ball was hit as soft, medium or hard. That's it; not "medium-hard" or "really hard-hit." Is there some subjectivity here as well? Of course. But it would be nice if Olney described the process correctly.