Dr Strangeglove-Part II- Not so Fail-Safe

I had a Free Press reader take exception to the first post of this series, or at least an excerpt that I posted in the comment section.  Eric Sunderland answered as follows-

Several MLB organizations listen to him and ask him questions on what he has seen about players. and i dont know where you get your info from but Miggy is the worst defensive 3rd basemen in the league. he has 0 defensive runs saved and has an ultimate zone rating of -5.1

I was getting my information from ESPN and MLB.com's stat section, but was sticking with stuff that can be done via conventional box score material. Mr Sunderland takes us deep into sabermetric territory, deeper than I've ventured, and I've been following Bill James (the grandfather of sabermetrics) for a couple of decades, going back to The Hidden Game of Baseball.

However, our Bob Jones alum goes past that other BJ (don't say that fundamentalist can't keep up with things) and into a new critter, Ultimate Zone Rating; relatively new, at least, it seems to date to 2003, shortly after I got married and had less time to geek out on sports. It does a detailed look at how infielders handle grounders hit their way, breaking it down into three metrics, double-play runs, range runs and error runs.

Cabrera shines in the first metric, leading the Al among third-baseman with 600 innings under their belt with a score of 1.6. He's second in error runs at 4.0, so the third column looks good.

Range runs... Cabrera sucks bilge water. He comes in at a -10.6, looking way up at the competition; former teammate Wilson Betemit is next to last at -3.2 and wishing I made the cutoff at 700 innings.

Add the three together, and Cabrera just misses the boobie prize with a -5.1, with Betemit saving him from ignominy with a -5.5.

Now, lets step back a bit and apply some old-school thought to this new metric. From the naked eye, Cabrera is fairly good with line drives, which UZR ignores; UZR thinks catching line-drives is mostly luck

I don't like using line drives to or thru the IF because even though there is some level of skill (positioning and reaction time) involved in catching a line drive, it is mostly luck.)

but Cabrera seems better than most third basemen at making those line-drive plays.

What UZR seems to catch are the grounders that Cabrera is a step slow on that scoot under his glove and into left field for a single. Those don't show up in the conventional fielding statistics but cost your team runs. He makes up for it with quick hands on the line drives, but plays that require leg work aren't his strong suit.

Last year's teammate Brad Penny was dating a Dancing with the Stars pro dancer (she dumped him shortly after the Tigers did), but don't expect Miggy there anytime soon with those feet. He's probably a somewhat better 3B than UZR says since they ignore one of his strong suits, but there is more than a germ of truth to that sucky range number on grounders.

P.S. Fail-Safe was the WW3 drama that Dr. Strangelove seemed to be spoofing; a B-58 (I thought B-52, but not quite) gets a false green light and nukes Moscow, so the JFK-analogue, to placate the Soviets, nukes New York while the Jackie-analogue was in town; at least that was how the book version went, I didn't see the movie version.

Comments

[alan]

The movie did the same thing. People need to research the files brfore they say something has not been done or try to recreate it. Read the history first.