by Keith Glab, BaseballEvolution.com
November 6, 2008
The 2008 Gold Glove Awards have been announced for
both leagues. There were few
travesties this year. Derek Jeter did not win a trophy, although that is due to his poor offensive season
rather than a sudden realization of his lackluster defense,
as evidenced by Derek Jeter Jr. winning the AL shortstop
hardware instead. No designated hitters won awards
this year. Albert Pujols did get snubbed again,
but there's no point in going
on and
on about that.
But there was one glaring,
smack-a-sausage-with-a-baseball-bat graphic blunder.
Nate McLouth was a lousy McPick for a National League
Gold Glove Award.
I have to admit, I was a bad Pirates fan this year.
I did see a couple of games in person, which is pretty
devoted since it is a 500-mile commute to lovely PNC
Park from Chicago. But as someone with access to
every baseball game on MLB.com, I rarely chose to watch
the Pittsburgh Pirates rather than the Cubs or White
Sox, who both contended for playoff spots all year long.
Of course, these Pirates did face the Cubs 18 times, the
White Sox three times, and the Brewers three times in a
pretty crucial September series. All in all, I
witnessed a decent amount of Pirates baseball, but not
enough to call myself an authority on each individual
player's defensive prowess.
If you had asked me yesterday to describe Nate
McLouth's defense, I'd have told you, "below average
range, slightly above average arm." Actually, I
thought I might have been underestimating his range,
only because my primary comparisons for him were Chris
Duffy and Nyjer Morgan, both of whom cover a lot of
ground as Pirate centerfielders. I had seen
McLouth make a couple of head-scratchingly obtuse plays
in the field, but I figured that I had just been
catching him at his worst. The Pirates, after all,
went 4-17 against Chicago teams and 63-78 against
everybody else.
Still, when I learned yesterday that Nate McLouth
would receive a Rawlings Gold Glove Award, I was
shocked. McLouth is a small market player who had
a good, but not great, offensive season, and has never
won a Gold Glove previously. For players like that
to come away with the hardware, they need to play some
especially flashy defense. I figured I would have
seen more of that in the couple of dozen or so games
that I watched McLouth if he were going to win an award
like this.
So I naturally turned to the statistics to see
whether there was something I was missing in my casual
analysis of his defense. It turns out that I was
indeed missing something: Nate McLouth is actually
the worst regular defensive centerfielder in baseball,
and possibly the worst regular outfielder altogether.
Pos |
NL Winners |
P |
Greg Maddux, Dodgers |
C |
Yadier Molina, Cardinals |
1B |
Adrian Gonzalez, Padres |
2B |
Brandon Phillips, Reds |
3B |
David Wright, Mets |
SS |
Jimmy Rollins, Phillies |
OF |
Nate McLouth, Pirates; Carlos Beltran, Mets;
Shane Victorino, Phillies |
Pos |
AL Winners |
P |
Mike Mussina, Yankees |
C |
Joe Mauer, Twins |
1B |
Carlos Pena, Rays |
2B |
Dustin Pedroia, Red Sox |
3B |
Adrian Beltre, Mariners |
SS |
Michael Young, Rangers |
OF |
Torii Hunter, Angels; Grady Sizemore,
Indians; Ichiro Suzuki, Mariners |
When I look for defensive statistics during the
season, the first place I turn to is The Hardball Times.
Their Revised Zone Rating simply calculates the
percentage of plays a fielder makes within his assigned
zone. They also track outs made out of that zone
as a counting stat. Among 20 qualifying
centerfielders, 15 made at least 90% of the plays in
their assigned zone. McLouth finished 20th among
these fielders with an 86.7% conversion rate. He
performed a little better in Outs Out of Zone: 12th
among the 20 with .067 OOZ per inning, though that was
well off the pace of .082 set by the incomparable Carlos
Gomez.
Fortunately,
The Bill James Handbook 2009 was just published last
week. Among the many indispensable nuggets inside
are the +/-
leaders and trailers for each position, both from
this season and the past three seasons. This
metric considers every ball hit at different vectors and
different velocities, and compares how often a fielder
turns a ball hit in that area into an out to what the
average fielder does. The result is expressed in
the number of plays above or below average that a
fielder has made at a given position. McLouth
finished the 2008 season with a -40 mark, worse than any
other defensive player in 2008. Furthermore, no
other centerfielder has even combined for a total that
low when adding up their past three seasons.
Basically, voters saw McLouth's .997 fielding
percentage and gave him a trophy. Of course,
Hunter Pence had the same total, plus 10 more outfield
assists than McLouth, plus he plays a position other
than centerfield, which would have balanced out the NL
winners a tad. I don't expect Gold Glove voters to
consider advanced statistical metrics such as +/-
ranking, but I do expect them to at least consider
traditional fielding metrics beyond mere fielding
percentage and some observational data. It's great
that they did not simply pick Jeff Francoeur or Aaron
Rowand simply because they won last year; on the other
hand, either one would have been a monumentally better
choice than McLouth for one of the NL's three outfield
Gold Glove Awards.
PS - No, it wasn't completely fair to dub Michael
Young as Derek Jeter Jr. His +/- total of -32 over
the past three seasons pales in comparison to Derek
Jeter's -68 mark, and some of those statistics are
likely skewed by the extremely fast infield of the
Ballpark in Arlington. Here's hoping that
home/road +/- splits are listed in
the Fielding Bible Volume II, available in February.