from Amazon
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Outfield Arms
John did an excellent essay in the THT Annual 2007 on Outfield Arms, where he looked at arms since 1957. Great stuff. He continues that work for the 2006 season.
How does it compare to the Fans’ Scouting Report? Let’s see:
If I weight the Fans’ as 50% for arm strength, 30% for accuracy, and 20% for release (I don’t know what it should be, though a regression may help), but let’s go with it: the top 4 arms for the Fans are Ichiro, Hawpe, Cuddyer, Rios (all happened to be RF).
Among RF, Walsh identifies the leaders as Rios, Hawpe, Magglio, Cuddyer, Ichiro. Except for Magglio, that’s what you call a bullseye. Magglio was ranked by the Fans as below average.
For CF, his list is not as strong, and I suspect it’s because of the position itself. After all, a CF is positioned far differently with a LH and RH at the plate, while a LF and RF aren’t moved over as much. I’m not sure if John adjusts for batter hand, but we should have that. In any case, the Fans have Lofton, Crisp, Pierre, Damon at the bottom of the arms list for CF, and Walsh agrees, more or less, with that assessment.
Podsednik has the worst LF arm according to both Fans and Walsh.
***
I also wonder if there are park factors especially when I see the ranking of Mike Cameron.
***
As he noted at the end, there is still some uncaptured arm work, notably with Soriano, some of which is gunning down guys trying to stretch singles into doubles.
I would also say that we should come up with translations between LF, CF, RF. Pretty easy to do, by simply looking at guys who played in multiple positions (though I would definitely use multiple years). This way, we can have everyone on the same scale.