THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

How the Gold Gloves work

From one of the former census takers:

Just as an aside, I was a Sporting News correspondent for several years in the 1990s when that publication sponsored the Gold Glove awards. It was the job of each correspondent to gather the votes of the coaches and manager of the team he covered—in my case, the San Francisco Giants.

Let’s just say I wasn’t impressed with the depth of knowledge of the coaches when it came to evaluating the candidates and coming to a conclusion. They’d pretty much blurt out the name of a guy that they remembered as making some good plays against them (often asking a fellow coach what he thought, and coming to a consensus opinion that way), or pick the player that had the reputation as being the best at his position, even if that reputation was no longer deserved. I’m pretty sure my team wasn’t the only one that operated this way, which explains how Rafael Palmeiro was voted Gold Glove first baseman in 1999 despite playing just 28 games at first base. Reputation and name recognition played a huge role in the voting, as I saw it first-hand. Maybe things have gotten better since then.

Wow.  I mean, WOW!  In all practicality, you’ll have some 50 coaches blurting out names, and you’ll have 15 of them say “Jeter”, and 12 of them say “Andrus”, and 10 of them say “Aybar”, and have the other 13 votes split with the other shortstops.  And so, with 30% of the vote, you give Jeter the Gold Glove.  (I don’t know if it’s Jeter… just saying how it’s so easy for someone to win an award this way.) And in all likelihood, if you asked them for 1st, 2nd, 3rd place finishes, all those who did not vote for Jeter as #1 likely would not put Jeter at #2 or #3.

It’s a silly system, a stupid system, made more so ridiculous based on the haphazard manner of collecting votes.

I’m shocked at how little MLB cares about this, that there’s simply letting Rawlings have the floor to themselves on this, as well as the BBWAA for the major awards.  The NHL is in control of their awards, as is the CFL.  Why would MLB not take this over and actually assign a dedicated staff to control this?