Visual Baseball: Five-tool analyzer Friday

Happy 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.

imageimageThis guy is about raw, unbridled power, whether he’s swinging the lumber or gunning down runners.

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Kevin Dame is a writer and visual designer who brings sports information to life in new and meaningful ways. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @kevintdame.
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Jacob
13 years ago

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?

Kevin Dame
13 years ago

Great suggestion Jacob.  Anyone have any suggestions on how to factor in some positional bias?

kds
13 years ago

My guess is that the way you are doing things now is that a certain distance from the center is average, for each of the tools.  For range, you could vary this average distance by position.  For example, the average CF would get the best starting position.  I think middle IF and corner OF would be around the overall average, and below that would be 3B, 1B and C last.

How you set the magnitude of these adjustments will allow you to have a relatively poor CF come ahead of the best 1B, as should be.

Jacob Rothberg
13 years ago

i’d love to see one of these for Jose Bautista