THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Very interesting. Hope the Jays noticed this.

Craig Robinson once recorded where every player was positioned on the field in a Jays/Twins game. It was pretty cool.

http://www.flipflopflyin.com/flipflopflyball/info-defensivepositioning.html

Just looking at his numbers across the board, wouldn’t we have to assume this is just random variation unless he’s able to sustain it for more than one year? We’re talking about a guy with a career BABIP of .291, and last year he posted a .214.

Maybe he has the ability to prevent hitters from pulling (or slapping) groundballs into the hole, and positioning your infielders closer to 2nd than normal will result in extra outs. But it seems like we’d need more than his results from 63 balls in play to make that sort of conclusion.

I’d certainly like to see the Jays experiment with it and find out, though.

Hi

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

We also touched on this in a recent post on Paul Maholm. Curious for feedback on that too.

http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/36579/mlb-roundup-scott-maholm-wood

My question on Cordero is perhaps it also speaks to the likes of Janish/Cosart being better defenders than what the Reds had in 2010.

Mark - Where does your advanced hit location data come from?

Peter
It is batted-ball data based on video review from a 3rd-party vendor. Hope that helps.

-Mark