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Friday, August 26, 2011
Yeah, but how many runs does so-and-so save at first base by virtue of his scooping ability?
Uh, not many, apparently. Conventional wisdom says that a “good” (at least in terms of handling errant throws) first baseman saves his teams countless numbers of runs and hence wins. One of the major criticisms of UZR and other similar defensive metrics with regard to first baseman is that that they don’t measure “scooping” ability.
A few years ago, I did a “with and without you” to try and quantify the scooping value of first baseman. I came up with something like 1-3 runs a year in observation (talent plus luck) and hence 1-2 runs or so in ability (you can infer the ability if you know the sample observation and the spread of talent as implied by the term to term correlation).
Also a few years ago, BIS (Dewan) published various players’ scoop numbers. The knock (by me and others) against their reported data was that it was meaningless unless you knew how many bad throws they didn’t scoop. Obviously a first baseman on a bad throwing team could have lots of scoops even if he weren’t very adept at scooping and vice versa.
They recently published some numbers again, this time though (correctly) including total errant throw numbers and the corresponding runs saves above/below average.
http://www.billjamesonline.com/first_baseman_scoops/
It looks like their numbers have around the same range as I got when I did my WOWY. And it looks like the value of a good scooping first baseman is not much - around 1-2 runs 80% of the way through the season.
And where is the venerable Mark Teixeira on their “best” list? Looks like scoop runs comprise maybe 15% of a a first baseman’s overall defensive value.
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