from Amazon
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
The hate for UZR
And it continues. At least the author, Lee Perrault (great name by the way… we all loved Gilbert.... that’s Zhill-bear, not gill-bert) tries to set the record straight.
And, he makes the argument even better in the comments by citing this great primer:
“The data used in calculating UZR was observed by human eyes and recorded as such — usually by multiple people per game, to weed out bias. In other words, UZR is based on eyeball data. It just takes a heap of such data and compiles it into a workable statistic. It tries to factor in all those contextual questions we have after seeing raw data ”
I mean, we should all memorize these three sentences. When you are asked by someone, just repeat this mantra. I don’t think I’ve ever seen three better sentences on UZR than these three.
***
The correct rejoinder for this: “Still, it’s hard to believe a guy who stole home can’t cover enough ground in center.” is
1. that Roger Cedeno was one of the fastest players in the league was a horrible centerfielder; I’d trust his coach Gary Pettis in CF more than I’d trust Cedeno, and Pettis is 50 years old
2. no one is saying he can’t cover enough ground in center! He either had an offyear in CF, or the data was not finely tuned enough to capture the nuances of the difficulty of each play. He had a great UZR in the corners in the past. Looking at that in totality, adding in the Fans Scouting Report, and he’s at least an average fielding CF
Tom,
To be fair, that quote I posted in the comments was originally posted by Joseph Pawlikowski over at River Ave Blues. The link i included in the comment (also included here) has more on his take concerning UZR.
http://www.riveraveblues.com/2010/01/the-stats-we-use-uzr-22389/
My reason for including those three sentences echoes your own. Wrapped up in all this UZR hate is that the overall goal of the statistic, and defensive statistics in general, is to give us some real reasons and accountability to what our eyes are possibly telling us.