2009 UZR: Updated
The 2009 UZR fielding data through last night’s games is now available. Remember that it’s a really small sample size. UZR should be updated at least every Sunday.
I believe everything is now running pretty smoothly on the site after what was an extremely chaotic first week behind the scenes. Last thing that needs to get done is minor league data and I’m hoping to kick that off starting tomorrow.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
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SSS warning obviously but it is no surprise for me that the M’s team UZR is way out in front. Although I expect to see some ‘small’ regression from Chavez’s UZR/150 which presently stands at 149!
Oh and bloody hell I forgot to say THANKS A LOT for updating UZR weekly – this is fantastic!!
It’s possible I’m missing something very obvious, but there appears to be something wonky going on with the UZR/150 calculations, at least for right fielders. Nelson Cruz is listed at 43 innings with a 3.2 UZR and a 58.9 UZR/150, Ludwick is at 36 innings with a 1.9 UZR for a… -42.1 UZR/150. Brandon Moss at 33 innings, 1.7 UZR and… 5.5 UZR/150.
CF is out of whack too, Sweeney and Gutierrez have the same UZR, Sweeney has fewer innings played, but Gutierrez has a substantially higher UZR/150. Same type of things going on in LF (Headley/Murphy) and 2B (Hill/Utley)… hell, looks like it’s going on everywhere.
The UZR/150 calculations are based off DG, which is based off the distribution of balls in play. It’s actually a little different, because DG isn’t exactly the same for ARM and DP as the one shown on the site, and there’s not really room to show those, so UZR/150 is actually not possible to replicate using only the stats available to you on the site.
You might as well ask yourselves how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I mean, where was the fielder positioned when the ball was struck? What was the angle and velocity of the ball coming off the bat? For GBs, what is the coefficient of restitution of the playing surface in question? Don’t know? Then you cannot even begin to analyze the fielding.
Here’s a line or two from Baseball Analysts:
“The Rays’ worst-to-first success has been fairly well documented. Their biggest improvement may have been their outfield defense, which saved nearly 70 runs more in 2008 than it did in 2007—the largest improvement by any outfield in the UZR era. B.J. Upton and Carl Crawford’s numbers skyrocketed while Eric Hinske and Gabe Gross were great replacements for Delmon Young and Jonny Gomes. Considering left and right fielders have remained constant for the Rays both years, I wonder to what extent the difference can be attributed to individual improvements from Upton and Crawford, and how much of the success was thanks to the unit meshing together in terms of positioning.”
We can be fairly certain Carl Crawford didn’t magically become a much better defensive LF over the course of the one year. Positioning might be part of the explanation, though I doubt it. So maybe it’s simply that balls weren’t being rocketed all over the yard in quite the same fashion in 08 as they were in 07. For those of you who didn’t run for cover when the subject of your enrollment in a physics course came up, think of time, “t”. The faster the ball is traveling the less time to field it. So we need to know how hard the balls are being hit. And since the fielder must intersect the ball’s path of travel, here, think of Train A leaving the station and Train B leaving the station, we need to know where the fielder [Train B] was when the ball [Train A] was hit.
In short sweet sum, Carl Crawford’s 07 and 08 prove the worthlessness of these ridiculous zone rating schemes that don’t even begin to account for the relevant physics of the event.
Sorry, one more, but here’s how truly pathetic it is:
“Over at The Hardball Times, a great article by Mitchel Lichtman investigating the connection between a player’s speed and the quality of his defense. It’s called “Speed and Defense.”
Lichtman estimated every player’s speed by using a version of Bill James’ Speed Score, but a version that doesn’t use defense (to avoid “cheating”). He then checked to see if the faster players played better defense than the slower players.
He found that they did.”
Uh, Mr. Lichtman, you didn’t need to do statistics. Physics. Here think of the base motion equation for a ball rolling across a flat surface and leaving aside the coefficient of friction/restitution: s [distance traveled] = x sub zero [it's initial position, which can be zero] + vt [velocity x time] + 1/2a(t)(t) [one-half x acceleration x time-squared]. Train A, the ball, must be intersected by Train B, the fielder, for the ball to be caught. See the “t” in the equation? So of course the faster the fielder is the more likely it is that he will catch the ball, assuming other things are roughly equal. And so why did this asshat need to run some correlation when students of physics have known this to be true for centuries?
Sorry, gals and guys, but this a sore spot for me. Look at all these guys who do these things. Your MBA types? Correlation is good for voting habits, stock market habits, etc., because those don’t obey the laws of physics, and even if we took a poll, they could be lying. But the baseball obeys the laws of physics. And so we don’t need correlation when physics and human factors analysis will do the job rather well, and we especially don’t need the correlation when it leads to absurd results like Carl Crawford finding the Holy Grail of left-fielding so that he might truly out-perform himself in 08 in comparison with 07. CC alone tells you that something is fundamentally wrong with your construct. And your construct is wrong, again, because it ignores the physics and human factors of the event. For a word on human factors, think reaction time [which is variable among humans][also think of just how a human might track a ball, as in, is it the way a tiger tracks his prey?].
And do you people not know why the NFL has a scouting combine? They are putting the physics and human factors in action and observing and measuring the same. How long does it take to get through the tires? How fast does he run the 40? How much does he move the blocking dummy and since it’s better to knock him on his ass than simply move him back, does the front of the thing pick up when he slams it?
Truly lastly, here is where and why I call Lichtman an “asshat”:
“Part II looks at whether there is also a relationship between speed and defensive value (for outfielders only) in a small versus a large outfield. In other words, is it an advantage to have a fast player patrolling a large outfield (and a detriment to have a slow one), over and above his overall defensive value, and can you leverage an otherwise poor defender by putting him in a small outfield?
It is conventional wisdom that the answer to these two questions is “yes,” though I am not aware of any studies or research looking into them. I have thought those assumptions were not necessarily true, even though they appear to be intuitively obvious and have been trumpeted by sabermetric analysts.”
Nimrod, where were you when they offered physics? If the fielder is faster, he can get farther in time, “t”. And if the field is smaller, the distance is smaller and not quite the same need for the high fielder velocity [speed] and acceleration. Go back and read the above equation again. What a colossal waste of time for this man. And to think that some MLB team hired the Nimrod. God save us.
“what is the coefficient of restitution of the playing surface in question? Don’t know? Then you cannot even begin to analyze the fielding. ”
This is a rediculous statement. Because we don’t know the exact physical equation of everything that is happening on a baseball field we “cannot even begin to analyze the fielding?”
Statistics are used to approximate things that we can’t measure directly. We cannot measure the physics of every ball in play, so we use the data we have to approximate fielding prowess. Because of the limitations, it does take a large sample to get a good measure, but that doesn’t make it useless.
Also, just because a fielder is faster doesn’t make him a better fielder. I think you are ignoring quite a bit by assuming that. The jump off the bat, the route to the ball, etc. are all important.
People like to complain about fielding statistics without giving a viable option to replace them. With the data available now, this is the best measure we have for fielding. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than anything else we have.
lol
A fielder can’t improve or play worse defensively from year to year? That is ridiculous. Can hitters have good or bad years? Yes, of course they do. Fielders can have good and bad years too. I suspect that fielders have a greater chance to improve over time due to learning; and declines in fielding from year to year likely are more influenced by physical declines due to nagging injuries and age than hitting. I don’t buy baseball defense as a pure physics problem so long as players have a brain attached to their bodies. The players’ vision, concentration, ability to anticipate what the batter will do (based on the pitch and batter/pitcher tendencies), and baseball instincts are all factors other than pure speed tools which affect defensive ability.
also a lot of it is just luck. A ball could be an extra inch to far, but it would count in the same zone that the fielder caught a previous ball.
To my critics:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/sports/2008942011_maristats29.html
Now kindly note where the thing is headed: towards the physics of the event, as measured by such things as what was the “hang time” [time, t, again], what is the speed of the ball off the bat, what was the angle of the ball off the bat, and just where in the heck was the fielder positioned when the ball was struck. As I said, and here let me borrow from Mr. Cameron, but as I said, without such things, it’s just the opinion of some dude in the box.
And, CJ, funny that you should mention nagging injury. That was Carl Crawford last year, who complained time and again about the pain in his legs from the beating taken running on the relatively hard turf at the Trop. Care to explain how he went off the chart, on the good end, with bad wheels?
Lastly, since Dave Cameron is no stranger to those here, as I said, so too he said:
“”I think the key is, what we really want to know is how far a fielder can go in a certain amount of time and we really don’t have that now,” Cameron said. “If Ichiro runs 180 feet to catch a ball, we’re going to know how much time he had to get to it and whether he should have been there. Right now, that’s just some dude’s opinion in a box.”
Time, t, and distance, s. The two keys that we don’t yet have. And here is my “base” point, to wit, whether he or any living human, even had a chance to catch the darn ball:
“”Then we’ll get more specific on the ability to make each play,” said Cameron, also a freelance contributor to The Wall Street Journal. “Rather than going off zones and saying, ‘He should have caught this and he should have caught that.’”
Yeah, as the zones don’t tell us whether he could or couldn’t, since the zones don’t tell us whether the ball was in the air for X seconds or Y seconds, nor do the zones tell us just where he was at when the ball was struck [i.e., how much ground he had to cover in the available time before the ball struck the ground].
And twins, sorry, but we can measure the event, and physicists and accident reconstructionists have been measuring similar events for as long as I’ve been alive [46 plus years] and then some. The problem today isn’t “can’t” but instead that the data simply is not available as no one has yet tried to obtain the data. The Hit F/X thing should be a godsend. Will be good for pitchers as well, since if you want to find out whether he is more “hittable” than someone else, simply compare the respective speed(s) of the ball off the bat and angle(s) of the ball off the bat.
And, twins, while they haven’t yet done it for baseball, well, note the report in this piece that they’ve done the coefficient of restitution thing for cricket and tennis:
http://turf.cas.psu.edu/2005/brosnan2.pdf
And the higher coefficient of restitution on turf explains why Frank White played 2B in Kaufmann Stadium in short RF. He was trying, and rightly so, to offset the increased speed of the ball on turf and thus less time till the ball reached him, by moving back, which gave him greater range [more time to move] than if he played at your standard depth on grass. And for more context, have any of you reading this seen Rafael Furcal do that what I call that “push bunt” thing? Pretty successful. Frank White couldn’t play back on Raffy, ’cause if he did, Raffy would push bunt on him. But in moving back in to a more normal depth, Frank would be giving away some time. Does that make him a bad fielder if Raffy hits a ball by him on the turf that would have been caught if on grass or if someone who didn’t push bunt was the hitter instead of Raffy? These things will never be answered by statistics analysis. Too much individualized context [as it were].
I know that it doesn’t please some people, but there are things in life that have to be seen in order to truly be understood. Fielding is one of those things. And you’ll also need some knowledge beyond the circumstance, since if you didn’t know Raffy and his push bunt, then you wouldn’t know that Frank isn’t playing closer in on the turf because he wants to, but because it’s either that or Raffy push bunts his way on base. And so, while the application of the relevant physics will truly be a godsend, we still need to watch the games and understand the larger circumstance that might influencing how the fielders are going about their job.
Lastly, I almost forgot, but as I’m sure that some already know, Chase Utley has that ungodly OOZ simply and only because Ryan Howard can’t field his position and so Chase is fielding some of his balls for him. That’s not a knock on Chase, but only a statement that the ungodly OOZ is owing to the failure of some other fielder and not so much to Chase’s “extraordinary” range. Let me leave you all with a comment from a fellow on a Brewers fan board:
“Zone ratings has to be one of the most flawed of attempts at quantifying performance in baseball. Individual factors can radically change the outcome. The Brewers use shifts aggressively causing a massive influence in rating. Prince Fielder is both not tall and not highly adept at balls in the dirt. That alone could change a “bad” ZR to a “good” one. Someone like Hardy plays with Rickie who sometimes takes balls that Hardy could field, but also Hall and Branyan who tend to range quite wide toward their left. Those are just three examples.
Infield conditions is a significant factor. Troy Tulowitzki credited Colorado’s as a big factor in helping him last year in an TV interview before the world series. Maybe the ever aggressive salesperson Mitch Lichtman can provide a “linear adjustment” based on species and height of grass. Perhaps to live up to the ultimate sales pitch he could include turgidity to measure the lushness at any point in time.
Defense is inherently a team activity. Constantly extending the mathematical formulas won’t change that.”
Time, t, in video form, with appropriate commentary, and not quite as far back as Frank White might have played:
http://tampabay.rays.mlb.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=3071130
Paul, many of us agree that you need hang time, including MGL who has hired people to track that very thing.
There’s also no need for name-calling on this blog, especially to the very people who donate their efforts to produce this site. Would you go to a party, curse the hosts, and then remain there to enjoy more of the party?