from Amazon
Friday, July 27, 2007
Mariner OF defense: from fantastic to horrible
USSM on the Mariner OF, littered with UZR and BIS data. Here’s my paraphrase:
Take three good to great CF, leave one in CF (Cameron), put one in RF (Ichiro) and the other in LF (Winn), and UZR gives them +46 runs in 2003. Keep one of them (Ichiro), and replace the other two with less than average fielders (Ibanez, Guillen), and they’re on pace to be worse than -30 runs in 2007. That’s basically switching 2 guys to get a turnaround of 80 runs, or 40 runs per switch. That’s about as large a switch as you can make.
I’ve always believed that a team that decides to give up fielding for hitting has never appreciated the value of fielding. “Yeah, he’s got a good glove, but...” What he means is that “… but I have no idea how to quantify that, so I’ll just use it as a tiebreaker, I certainly can’t count that as +/- 20 runs.”
Did you know that in 2003, they gave up 234 doubles + triples? And in 2007, TO DATE, that number is 230? Yowza. Their BABIP in 2003 was .272 and in 2007 it’s .313.