from Amazon
Monday, September 15, 2008
Ugly statement
In a brief article on defense, which is an introduction to Huckabee’s several-part series on evaluating defenders on BP’s web site, Gary writes this:
“The ratings are a combination of Zone Rating, Range Factor, and me making the best (and admittedly grossly flawed) assessment I can of the job they’re doing. One metric doesn’t tell you a whole lot, but if they all agree, and agree with visual perception, I’m pretty comfortable thinking that you’re moving close to an accurate representation of a player’s defense.”
The bolding is mine.
I have two comments:
One, although the wording “moving close” gives him a lot of wiggle room, does he really expect us to agree that a combination of ZR, RF (of all things) and his opinion is going to move us close to anything? ZR is not bad of course. I am afraid that RF adds nothing to the discussion. And, after he (Gary) just gets done telling us that one person’s observation, especially that of a fan, is worth “less than nothing,” why should we care what he thinks about a particular player’s defensive ability.
Two, in this day and age, with plenty of very good PBP fielding metrics (which he does not even mention - and I will go on record as saying that BP does NOT like to mention other people’s work other than their own and other than the mainstream metrics - I think for obvious reasons), why does he even waste his time writing a series of articles on ZR, RF, and his own opinion? Yawn.