THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

<< Back to main

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Replacement Level Fielding

Using a process similar to that recently published by Chone and jinaz, I come up with each player’s plays made above average for each of the three years, 2004-2006. (Everett from 2004-2006 is +10, +40, +39).

I take the top 30 fielders at each position by balls in zone (i.e., opportunities), for each year.  Those are my regulars.  Everyone else is a bench player.

The bench 1B is a better fielder than the regular 1B, by 0.7 plays per 162 GP.  Here are how the regulars fare relative to the bench player:


1B: -0.7
2B: -2.1
SS: +4.1
3B: +11.1
LF: -3.4
CF: 0.0
RF: +3.8

Overall, the average regular fielder is around +2 plays better than the average bench player. (Note that the bench player will include regulars playing out of position.)

The big standout is the 3B, as I’ve mentioned many times.  Rolen, Chavez, Beltre, Crede, ARod (pre 2006), Inge, Zimmerman, Feliz, amongst others… when was the last time we had such a fantastic group of fielders among 3B?

This is yet even more indication that it is very foolish to treat the average 2B = average 3B, when looking at offense+defense.

When you see how the fans evaluate 3B:
http://www.tangotiger.net/scouting/pos2006_3B.html
and 2B:
http://www.tangotiger.net/scouting/pos2006_2B.html

You’ll be hard-pressed to say that the average fielding 2B is a better fielder than the average fielding 3B.  And, the average offense at 3B is much higher than at 2B.  There’s no question that, today, the average 3B is a better overall player than the average 2B.  Any metric that treats them as equals is just fooling you.

(28) Comments • 2007/04/06 • SabermetricsFieldingTalent_Distribution
Page 1 of 1 pages

<< Back to main