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August 24, 2009

2009 Fan’s Scouting Report - call for ballots

As he does every year, Tom Tango is compiling the Fans' Scouting Report. He is seeking help from baseball fans to rate the defensive abilities of the players they have watched this season.

Baseball's fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn't the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondel White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don't need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you've seen play in at least 10 games in 2009, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

If you've watched a lot of baseball in 2009, or at least enough to meet the guidelines, please participate in compiling this valuable resource.
Posted by: Mike Fast

August 08, 2009

Other factors 1, numbers behind numbers 0

Brian Bannister was knocked out of his start Friday night after allowing five runs to the Oakland Athletics in the fourth inning. What happened? Well, it certainly didn't help that Bannister threw only 20 of 36 pitches in that inning for strikes. He walked Tommy Everidge and Adam Kennedy, both of whom came around to score. But aside from that, did Bannister's "numbers behind numbers" fail him?

He allowed seven balls in play in the inning: five ground balls, one line drive, and one fly ball. So in that sense, he got what he wanted--70 percent ground balls. That's good, right? Did they hit the ball too hard on the ground? Did he just get unlucky? Or was he trumped by, as Dayton Moore puts it, the "other factors" of the defense behind him? Let's take a look.

Batted ball #1: a sharp ground ball single scoots between second baseman Alberto Callaspo and first baseman Billy Butler into right field. This one was hit pretty solidly.

Batted ball #2: a bouncing ground ball fielded by first baseman Billy Butler at the edge of the grass, toss to Bannister coming over for the out. Well-executed defense, but a typical ground ball out on the infield.

Batted ball #3: a line drive out straight to center fielder Josh Anderson. The ball was hit right on the nose but Bannister got a little lucky with this one.

Batted ball #4: a three-hop ground ball single past the shortstop side of second base and into center field. Why was Betancourt positioned so far into the hole that he couldn't even come close to this one?



Batted ball #5: a fly ball double off the wall in right field. This was a change-up down but right over the middle of the plate, and Cliff Pennington hit it hard and deep. Blame Bannister for this one.

Batted ball #6: a two-hop ground ball single cut off by second baseman Alberto Callaspo on the shortstop side of second base. Callaspo's throw was unable to beat a speedy Rajai Davis at first. Once again, Betancourt is playing deep in the hole and can't seem to range over to get this one, although it looked like he could have made the play on the ball and the throw to first on Davis if he'd called Callaspo off. On both this ball and the Ellis single it looked like Callaspo was running about twice as fast to the ball as Betancourt.



Batted ball #7: a two-hop ground ball single past shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt in the hole between short and third and into left field.

.

Betancourt can't field balls hit up the middle on the shortstop side of second base, even if the second baseman can reach them. He can't field balls hit into the hole. I must be missing some of those "other factors" like defensive positioning and what not, although I'm not sure what positioning gives you problems with balls up the middle and in the hole.

I don't watch as many games as Dayton Moore's scouts or Willie Bloomquist's memory, though, so you should draw your own conclusions.
Posted by: Mike Fast

August 03, 2009

Midseason TotalZone Minors

In February, Sean ("Chone") Smith applied his TotalZone defensive metric to the last few years of minor league data. The resulting numbers confirmed some opinions, questioned some conventional wisdom, and helped us better understand the relationship between fielding at various levels of professional baseball.

Sean or I will probably go further in depth when the 2009 season is in the books, but while we wait, we've run TZ for the full-season minors through games of July 31. Read on for some of the highlights.
Click for more...

Posted by: Jeff Sackmann

July 31, 2009

Errata data

Stew Thornley has been compiling information on baseball errors, and he's posted his findings, year by year. Here is the rate of errors per game and per ball in play for the last five decades:

Decade     E/G     E/BIP
1960's    1.76     3.15%
1970's    1.76     3.05%
1980's    1.63     2.86%
1990's    1.46     2.60%
2000's    1.31     2.35%

So what's the story here? Are fielders getting better? Maybe the gloves are better? Or are scorers getting more lenient?

(thanks to the Retrosheet mailing list, as inspired by Tango)

Posted by: Dave Studeman

July 28, 2009

The incredible catch that wasn’t

Last night Delwyn Young made an outstanding catch with his bare hand, catching the ball after it kicked up off right fielder Garrett Jones' foot. The only problem is the umpire ruled the ball hit the ground so it was not ruled a catch. See for yourself:



Posted by: Paul Singman


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