Friday, August 06, 2010
Visual Baseball: Five-tool analyzer Friday
Posted by Kevin DameHappy Friday. What better way to start your weekend than with a fresh sampling of five-tool analyzer visuals. Inquiring minds want to know who's:
All-World
All-Most
All-Muscle
All-Power & Speed
All-Feet
All-D
Let's start with All-World. No surprise here.
Here's a guy who could be All-World, but for one fatal flaw.
This guy is about raw, unbridled power, whether he's swinging the lumber or gunning down runners.
Your throwback all-glove infielder.
Classic combination of power and speed.
Well, the best you can saw about him is that he moves good.
"The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing." - Edward Tufte.
Feel free to send comments, questions, and suggestions to Kevin via email.
Perhaps you’ve addressed this before, but the “range” measurement bothers me slightly here. I can’t imagine that Justin Morneau, for example, has better “range” than Matt Kemp or even Josh Hamilton. But that’s how your measurement comes up, since Morneau has above-average range for a 1B and Kemp has poor range for a CF, according to your measurements. But of course, if the two swapped positions, Morneau would be woefully inadequate. Given that we’re talking about “tools,” which are generally evaluated independently of position, it seems wrong to essentially punish certain players for playing harder positions.
Certainly, I think Josh Hamilton is more of a “five-tool player” than Morneau, and I don’t think anyone would even call Morneau a four-tool player. He’s a more than adequate fielder at his position, but he’s playing there because he hits well and can’t really field anywhere else. First basemen are almost never considered five-tool—otherwise they’d be outfielders.
Perhaps this graph could incorporate a positional bias?