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Monday, September 21, 2009
Doug Glanville: Times On Base
He says:
Yes, 40 percent is a great on-base percentage, but there are ways you can get on base without statistically being “on base.” There’s a fielder’s choice, which you can force with your speed (or maybe the infielders didn’t quite make a clean play); or you can reach by error, and errors often result from the pressure you put on the infield by running well. So you may have gotten on base a few more times than the stats show, and with that comes more potential for scoring runs.
It is a monumental joke that MLB thinks that when you reach base on error, that it’s classified similarly as if you grounded out: you get a tally in the AB column, none in the H, none in the BB, and there is no official Reached on Error category for the tally. So, by default, it gets treated like a ground out. Stupid. Well, I count it. And more importantly, b-r.com and Retrosheet also count it.
On b-r.com, we see that Glanville reached base a total of 69 times, either due to error, or by fielder’s choice (and no out recorded). He also never reached base on catcher’s interference. Retrosheet shows him with 68 “ROE”, which has the same definition of B-R.com (and which is also my definition). I don’t have my db handy at the office, otherwise I could tell you which one is correct (or why the two differ).
As Francona said recently, “You put a guy in the leadoff spot and tell him to be patient — we did that with Doug Glanville in Philadelphia. He went from having 200-and-something hits to about 150 hits and he ended up with 13 more walks. It just didn’t work.”
Not true. When Glanville got his career high in hits (204), he also got a career high in walks (48). Why would Glanville quote what something said about himself that wasn’t even true! Looks like NY Times facts-checks as much as ESPN does. (Or are Op-Ed pieces free of fact-checking?)