from Amazon
Monday, November 06, 2006
Fielding Bible Awards
In the 2007 edition of the Bill James Handbook, there is a section called The Fielding Bible Awards, with a panel of 10 experts, including The Fans’ Scouting Report. These awards are for fielding excellence, and the winners were recently announced.
Interesting to me is how did the Fans’ do. That is…
Panelists against Peers
...how well did they hold up to the rest of the panel? A correlation of the individual votes to the overall average of the experts is listed below:
0.73 John Dewan, BIS owner
0.73 BIS Video Scouts
0.66 Bill James
0.65 Rob Neyer
0.64 Mat Olkin
0.64 Nate Birtwell, BIS ops
0.63 Joe Posnanski
0.59 Fans’ Scouting Report
0.58 Hal Richman (Strat-O-Matic)
0.53 Mike Murphy, Chicago radio
Panelists against BIS
When the voting was conducted, a ballot containing BIS data was also distributed. This was done as a way to provide data, but it’s not something I would do, if I’m also part of the panel. I ran a correlation between BIS and the other 9 panelists, with the following results:
0.56 Mat Olkin
0.56 Nate Birtwell, BIS ops
0.41 Hal Richman (Strat-O-Matic)
0.40 Bill James
0.39 Joe Posnanski
0.38 Fans’ Scouting Report
0.35 Rob Neyer
0.33 Mike Murphy, Chicago radio
0.33 John Dewan, BIS owner
Since I know for a fact that the Fans’ results made zero use of the BIS data, it seems that correlations in the .30-.45 range were not influenced by BIS data. I also know that in the past, the correlation between Fans’ and UZR was around .35. It seems therefore fair to say that the correlation between any two systems that use completely independent sources of data will get you a correlation of .35. The correlation between Olkin and Birtwell was 0.45.
Panelists against Fans
Next I looked to see how each of the individual panelists did against the Fans’. If Roger Ebert best represents the average filmgoer, then who should the Fan listen to, to get like-minded analysis? Who is the Fans’ Roger Ebert?
0.56 Hal Richman (Strat-O-Matic)
0.44 Nate Birtwell, BIS ops
0.38 BIS Video Scouts
0.36 John Dewan, BIS owner
0.28 Mike Murphy, Chicago radio
0.26 Mat Olkin
0.17 Bill James
0.17 Joe Posnanski
0.11 Rob Neyer
Hal Richman has his fingers on the pulse of the Fans, which may explain the success of Strat-O-Matic. The Fans clearly agree the least with the James, Posnanski, and Neyer, all once, or currently, KC-based.
It’s interesting how much wider the gap is between the Fans and its peers, compared to BIS and its peers. This may be some evidence that BIS data influenced the voters somewhat. Or, that BIS is grounded in reality more than the Fans are.
Crazy Picks
Were there any really crazy picks? Did any of the panelists select someone as one of the three best fielders, and yet, those fielders were not one of the TEN best, according to the panelists as a whole? For example, the Fans chose Pujols, Teixeira, and Minky as the three best fielding 1B in the league, which matches the panelists overall. So, great job there on the Fans. How about for the other positions? From this standpoint, Richman had 2 crazy picks, the Fans had one crazy pick (Mark Kotsay), as did James and Murphy also have one crazy picks, and everyone else had none. So, it seems that there’s a strong consensus that if someone thinks of a fielder as being “great”, he’s at least “above average”.
Blind Voters
Finally, how about looking at the consensus top 3 picks, but that a panelist didn’t even list in his top 10? Mike Murphy had 6 such players, Richman 4, and Fans’ 2. Murphy doesn’t think that any of these players are among the 10 best at their position, while the consensus of the group has them in the top 3: Minky, Reed Johnson, Dave Roberts, Corey Patterson, Alexis Rios, JD Drew. Richman did not think much of Corey Patterson, Alexis Rios, Chase Utley and Miguel Olivo. Fans’ disregarded Andruw Jones and JD Drew. For the Fans’, CF was the toughest position to nail down, as there was a huge group of players who were within a hair of each other. Jones and Torii Hunter simply were a shade below. JD Drew was considered above average, just not top 3.
Youngsters Fans Love
Betancourt (SS), Zimmerman (3B), Langerhans (LF), Matthews (CF), Markakis (RF) also received very high scores from the Fans, and ranked well by the panelists, just nowhere near that high. It’ll be interesting to see if the panelists come around on these players, or if Fans are simply dazzled by style not substance. That is, who is right?
How did the Gold Gloves compare?
Gold Glovers finished 1st and 2nd at 1B. At 2B, the GG finished 1, 7. At 3B, 2, 4. At SS, 2 and 18 (! Jeter). At C, 1, 5. The 5 GG in CF finished 1,2,7,8,12 and the 1 GG in RF finished 1st in RF. The two GG pitchers finished 1st and 2nd with the Fielding Bible.
Overall, Jeter was the only purely horrible pick. Gonzalez of Boston, or Betancourt of Seattle would have been the appropriate choice. All other choices were defensible, though not necessarily great. That is, they deserve our respect. Except for the Jeter pick.
All-in-all, a very interesting exercise, and of historical value.