from Amazon
Friday, November 07, 2008
Do fielders with good range commit more errors?
No.
You have heard this for a long time, usually in reference to telling us why errors (fielding percentage) should not be used to evaluate fielding, as it often is, either directly (the “best defensive team” is always the team with the fewest errors) or indirectly (as in the GG awards, where the voters, if they look at any stat at all, it is fielding percentage) or simply in conversation and in the MS media:
“Players with more range get to more balls; therefore they are likely to make more errors. You can’t boot what you can’t reach.”
Poppycock. Guess what? Players with more range make fewer errors. As to why, I don’t know. It could be that they are simply more athletic or it could be that they get more love from the official scorers.
Here is the data:
I looked at all fielders who were greater than +3 (total - not per anything) or greater in range runs (UZR) and put them in one bucket - the good range fielders. I put those with -3 range runs or less in the bad range bucket.
Then for each bucket, I looked at their “error runs” which is just error rate turned into runs above/below average using the error rate of the average fielder at that position as the baseline.
2008
Good range N=144 players
+15.1 range runs per 150 games
+1.1 error runs per 150
Bad range N=136 players
-15.1 range runs per 150
-.32 error runs per 150
If we turn that around and create 2 buckets according to error runs (essentially error rate or fielding percentage), here is what we get:
Good fielding perc. N=61 players
+3.8 error runs per 150
+.6 range runs per 150 games
Bad fielding perc. N=61 players
-6.2 error runs per 150
-5.6 range runs per 150
So a player with a lot of errors tends to have lousy range. A player with few errors, however, tends to have only slightly better than average range (and of course the players with average errors are also slightly above average in range).
Bottom line is that a player’s fielding percentage, especially if it is poor, actually tells us a lot about his range, and it is NOT in the direction that a lot of people were thinking…