Dayton Moore and Defense
“The defensive statistics – I still really don’t understand how some of those statistics are evaluated, I really don’t. When you watch baseball games every single day, its very apparent who can play defensively and who can’t.”
That quote comes from Dayton Moore on a Kansas City radio station yesterday morning. Let’s ignore that Moore probably shouldn’t publicly admit that he doesn’t know about defensive metrics and assume he’s not the only GM with this ‘flaw’. He could easily say defensive statistics are imperfect and should be combined with some good scouting and had his point made just as easily, but he didn’t. Whatever, the larger point is that he’s claiming Yuniesky Betancourt looks like a good defender if you watch him every single game. That’s simply untrue.
For someone to think Betancourt is a good defender that person either has no idea what a good defender looks like, or simply can’t evaluate defensive ability. You know who watched Betancourt seemingly every day since his career began? The Mariners fan base. Thanks to Tom Tango and the Fans Scouting Report, we have their honest evaluations of Betancourt’s defensive ability dating back to his rookie season.
Betancourt was appraised highly in 2005, receiving a 86 overall position-neutral score. The number of ballots shot up by nearly 200 in 2006 and Betancourt retained a fair score of 82. Even more ballots were cast in 2007 and his score again slipped to 69. Then 2008, Betancourt’s position neutral score sat at 39. The obvious retort is that fans aren’t qualified to scout defensive qualities either, but compare the scores to what UZR has said and a trend emerges:
Year – FSR/( UZR/150)
2005 – 89/2.1
2006 – 82/0.7
2007 – 69/-1.4
2008 – 39/-12.7
The fans say Betancourt has lost defensive quality steadily since 2005 and so does UZR. Both agree the biggest jump happened between 2007 and 2008. I suppose you could say the numbers have influenced the fans a bit – we are talking about a pretty intelligent fan base with Seattle – but our version of UZR only became readily available last winter.
The fans and UZR agree that Betancourt has gotten progressively worse and is a below average shortstop, Moore and the Royals scouts don’t. Odds are, Moore and company have the least amount of data to form their opinion on Betancourt. We’ll see if Moore is right after all.
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Willie Bloomquist thinks Betancourt will win a Gold Glove. Do you trust Willie more than Dayton?
I think sometimes the “eyes approach” tend to see the ceiling and the brain then extrapolates…. Certainly it seems KC relied upon precious little visual data.
That’s the beauty of stats….
Anyway, Dayton bought what he and his scouts (is it fair to put this one on his scouts?) think Yuni could become.
If I was a KC fan and I hadn’t already, I’d take a break from my fandom or jump ship completely right about now.
As a Royals fan, I haven’t jumped ship yet, but its pretty close. The fact that Dayton opennly admitted to not knowing the first thing about relatively simple stats was glorious to hear. He’s a moron and should be fired simply for admitting that he is in fact a moron.
It’s his job to know these things, not play a guessing game with every player based on what ESPN shows you. Those are called “highlights” and only show the good or awesomely bad.
One thing Dayton is good at is assembling a pitching squad. But even the stat guys will admit, it’s much harder to statistcally analyze and predict pitching. There’s too many factors. If a new pitching coach comes in a changes a guy’s arm angle he could be Cy Young or Daryl May because of it. So fine, he’s a good scout for a good pitcher… but we’ve reached a point where a ball can be hit, and based on the standing position of a player we can (with almost certainty) know if he’s capable of getting it. Yuni can’t get anything and couldn’t make a play if it killed him.
As a Royals fan, I’m happy Zack Greinke is signed so I don’t have to weap if he entered free agency this winter and we couldn’t afford him.
I don’t think it’s fair to say he doesn’t know the first thing about UZR. In the same interview, he brought up some of the limitations that fielding stats like UZR have. Not being an expert and being clueless are different. I mean, if you forced me to explain UZR right now, I couldn’t explain exactly how its calculated.
In Moore’s (sort of) defense, he’s definitely not the only one to be skeptical of UZR/FRAA/Fielding Bible/etc. Defense is tough to evaluate.
Then again, the guys on the top of this (http://www.fangraphs.com/careerleaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&type=6&min=1000) are pretty much considered awesome fielders by everyone. Looking at this (http://www.fangraphs.com/careerleaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&type=6&min=1000), and I think most agree that Bernie Williams and Ken Griffey Jr. have been horrible butchers whenever they have a glove in hand.
At the end of their careers, both Bernie and Griff looked overmatched in center and the numbers have shown it. I never watched him play everyday so I can’t speak for Junior’s defense. However, being a Yankees fan and watching Bernie for years, I would definately say he lost alot of range in the outfield over the last few years of his career. I can’t say he deserved the gold gloves he won, but I would bet he was at least one of the better defensive CF in the 90’s.
True. I’m a Red Sox fan, Williams definitely wasn’t horrible forever. It was just flat-earth Torre refusing to make a change and letting Williams embarass himself (example: why the hell was Williams starting in CF in 2004 when they had Lofton?).
I still take my defensive stats with a grain of salt, but normally when I see a number way on one end of the other, I think it’s recommended to look at it. Moore doesn’t seem to care what every defensive rating (outside of FRAA, weirdly) says about Betancourt, but what it “looks like”. Just like how Nomar “looked like” a great defensive SS, until Sox fans had a taste of what great defense looked like with Pokey “unfortunately has to hit” (nickname mine) Reese, and later on O-Cab.
Is Dayton Moore trying to anti-Moneyball his team with the cheapest players today who all have the worst OBP possible? Now they aren’t even cheap with Betancourt’s contract.
He probably thinks somehow that SLG and ISO are undervalued in today’s game.
Take a peak at Vernon Wells and Alfonso Soriano’s contract and say that again.
P.S. is anyone still as stunned as me that a Beane disciple would give out such a bad then / worse now deal?
@ Joe R re: V-Dub and Soriano’s contracts.
First of all, yes awful at the time they were signed no question. I have no knowledge of the inner workings of the Cubs and Soriano was signed as a free agent.
Wells was an extension or a “gasp!” extension if you will. It’s pretty much common knowledge up here that the Wells signing came from higher up than the Beane disciple: president Paul Godfrey and possibly even “Uncle Ted” Rogers had more to do with it than J.P. The more WTF? signings from J.P. have been Royce Clayton and David Eckstein in back to back seasons (both of whom thankfully lost their jobs mid-season but not before Eckstein ended Aaron Hill’s season and put his career in jeopardy unfortunately), Shannon Stewart, Kevin Mench, Brad Wilkerson, David Dellucci, John Thomson, Tomo Ohka, Victor Zambrano. One thing all those have in common: they were short and relatively cheap financially, no talent was given up and except for Clayton and Eckstein, they were used to allow other players to be fully ready for prime time (Lind, McGowan, Marcum, and now Snider).
By all means swing away on his various brain-dead comments: Dunn, B.J. Ryan’s various “injuries” etc., questionable decisions: the firing of Keith Law comes to mind. Maybe Law left in disgust after watching J.P. sort of try to pull what Moore and Co. are trying to pull on Royals fans: proclaiming to be a stats based guy, but secretly (and now interestingly enough as his contract comes to an end: not so secretly) holding true to his old school scouting background. Unfortunately his scouting database seems to come up about 3-5 years behind the actual year he’s in. I won’t hold his feet to the fire for Wells though. I don’t think he had much of a say. It’s a shame because that contract will spell the end of other more deserving (and better) players careers in Toronto (Doc, maybe eventually Hill and even Rios) due to its colossal, immovable nature.
As for the original topic: sorry for the derailment. I feel really bad for Royals fans. They have incredibly intelligent, passionate fans if James, Neyer, Jazayerli, and Posnanski are anything to go on. It would be a cryin’ shame to waste 1 of the best and brightest young pitchers by surrounding him with 8 defensive fenceposts and having 9 fenceposts hit in the lineup (slight exaggeration). Talk about having a case for a non-support suit and he’s still what… 10-5 at the break. I love Roy Halladay and the Jays, but Zach Greinke deserves this All-Star game start in my books. At least Doc has some talent surrounding him. Greinke’s going it alone and still winning and performing at an extremely high level.
One point being missed by the one or two decrying the “stats geek” movement here is that nobody is saying that traditional scouting should be abandoned for spreadsheets. It will always have a place in the game. What is being said is that in this day and age it is idiotic or heads in the sandish if you will to try to run a major league front office completely traditionally or completely mathematically. Would any other area of business cut out 50% of the available data? No. So, why should professional sports be any different?
Not really. A rather inconsistent player had a great season and was paid as if he was going to continue repeating it. It’s only spectacular because every part of his game fell apart so markedly. It’s not like Beane or the stats crowd uniquely figured out that it’s folly to buy into career years, so I’m not sure that they should be any more likely to keep that in mind when making decisions.
Someone on this site recently mentioned that the Wells contract was to some degree an edict from above anyway.
I’m not defending Betancourt at all, but I doubt it’s a coincidence that the fans’ opinion of his defense has gone down along with his actual offensive performance.
Maybe. I doubt UZR was affected similarly, though.
He could easily say defensive statistics are imperfect and should be combined with some good scouting and had his point made just as easily, but he didn’t.
________
YES HE DID!
No, he couldnt have. Scouts hate Betancourt’s defense as well.
There was simply no justification no matter how you try to spin it. Bad move and now we can see the basis of a bad thought process behind the move.
Royals Review took one sentence out of a 25 minute interview and ran with it ..
I am no royals fan, or Dayton Moore defender, but this is effing BS!
You guys create a new stat every other month, take 5-6 posts trying to explain it, and then get all pissy because every head of baseball team doesn’t bow before you ….
its getting so fricking old …
I sort of agree with you, William. Fully that taking the imperfect science of fielding stats verbatum is nutso.
But Dayton Moore has earned absolutely NO benefit of the doubt. Therein lies the problem. I’ve been a critical ass to Dave Cameron on here before, but I’d trust him with a team if I owned one way before Moore at this point.
UZR was introduced in 2001.
Still it was a heartfelt narrative.
LMAO
“Yuniesky Betancourt is the Rolls Royce of defensive shortstops. You’ve seen the rest; now watch the best.”
-Dave Cameron
Yes, because Dave is clearly a psychic and should be able to predict when a plus defender will gain a ton of weight and collapse defensively.
Yuni was a fantastic SS in 2005. How dare Dave point that out.
I don’t think that’s necessarily it, William. This man is the GM of a team that, quite frankly, is a steaming pile of poo. The team can’t run, hit, field, or pitch. They have like 4 redeeming players and that’s it. On top of this, the GM rather publicly says that fielding stats are stupid and he and his staff are better judges of talent than any number.
However, the on-the-field results show that DM is clearly wrong. Billy Butler or Mike Jacobs are trash at first. Jose Guillen has to be one of the worst fielders in baseball. Mark Teahan can’t play any position well.
In any case, we’ve got a GM who is willing to go out in public and say that he doesn’t care for defensive metrics…when a significant number of teams use UZR or some other more proprietary defensive system to measure performance. What DM has done is the equivalent of sticking his head in the sand.
UZR, Dewan +/-, even if you look at regular fielding percentage for this season, Betancourt is pretty bad at it.
Exactly.
Oh wow. I can’t believe that the guy actually said that Yuni is a good defender….simply wow. Just by watching him a lot…. GMZ definitely made a great trade.
Yes it was. It would have been a great trade for one rasin (sp?) bag, let alone a bucket of balls or a dozen bat donuts, but GMZ managed to pry two pitching prospects. Holy crap.
The degree to which every defensive metric would have to be wrong for him to be worth his salary/being a starter is enormous. The statistical consensus is he is one of the worst defenders in baseball, the variation between him being the worst or the fifth worst is expected, but for him to make up for a 300ishOBP, he would have to have be so good at ss that they wouldn’t need to field a 3b. or maybe being that good at defense would get him back to replacement level…
The fans going to Tango’s website are apt to be statistically inclined, and may be subconsciously influenced by statistical defensive ratings.
He has made an attempt to get the word out on non-sabermetric sites, but I’m inclined to agree. It’s hard to be a baseball fan and active on the internet without coming across the advanced defensive metrics at least secondhand.
I’m not going to comment too emphatically on Betancourt’s defense. I’ve only seen him play a handful of times when the Yanks are playing Seattle. He seemed to pull off some pretty slick moves, but like I said.. I’ve seen him play maybe 5-6 times, tops.
However, I’ve read more articles than I can count telling me what a horrible fielder Betancourt is. So my opinion is that he’s a bad fielder. I don’t understand how the defensive stats work either, but the men and women writing articles for my favorite glowing rectangle publications have certainly used them to very persuasive effect.
I don’t think anyone who studies these defensive metrics is picking on Betancourt or trying to make things up. I don’t know if there is some fatal flaw in the defensive metrics. But I think to point to a “fan survey” of fans saying that Betancourt is a horrible defender after the Sabermetric + Mariner blogosphere went into overdrive telling all who would listen that Betancourt is, in fact, a horrible defender.. not really a great argument.
What are you talking about? Tango’s “fan survey” as you so cleverly insult with unnecessary quotation marks was not taken yesterday. He does it in the offseason. Every year (for how many years now? At least 4). This survey wasn’t conducted after this trade was made.
I’m not big on the fan survey for a lot of reasons, but used in conjunction with the numbers and scouting reports, it is just another piece of the puzzle, and a great supplement to the argument.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been a Mariner season ticket holder since well before Betancourt came up and have seen at least 60% of all his games. He seems to have tremendous hand-eye coordination and reflexes. In the same game he might make a play that could only be done by someone posessing amazing tools and then muff a routine grounder or not even come close to a ball that you would expect a shortstop to get. I think any major league shortstop will occasionally make a terrific play. The advanced fielding stats do agree with my observation. I hope this trade has some positive mental effect on his game because he really looks like he should be a very good fielder.
Everyone should listen to the Radio interview in full… search for radio station 810 WHB. I couldn’t believe some of the clips that the radio station was playing yesterday… it made me shake my head in shame.
This trade is bad, don’t get me wrong, but atleast it didn’t block any young prospects from advancing…like the Jacobs trade did.
The thought that had crossed my mind, before this radio interview, was that Dayton was quasi putting a bad team in the majors so he could reap the benefits of having top draft picks, ala the Rays of the early part of this decade. I was thinking that maybe Dayton was trying to out-National the Nationals for a shot at Harper? But this radio interview clearly demonstrates that he just doesn’t get it.
The thing is that he is building a quality minor-league system. His timing for locking up Greinke for the next 4 years couldn’t have been more perfect. But he clearly doesn’t get it…or maybe he knows exactly what he is doing?
Sure, they aren’t blocking prospects THIS YEAR. But Betancourt is in the middle of a long-term deal. And what’s the point of getting him to be a stopgap when you already have below-replacement stopgaps? As Rany said in his blog (someone got a link?), this team is not going anywhere. May as well save the money and the prospects and just play Willie Bloomquist there for the rest of 2009 and figure it out later.
The Royals got Betancourt because they didn’t have a shortstop. They still don’t have a shortstop.
again… I am in no way defending the trade
All I was saying that it was a less “smelly” piece of crap trade. The royals have no decent middle infield prospects in the upper minors.
The so-crazy-that-it-may-work theory?
Worked for the Boston Celtics.
My brother is with the M’s…he would tellyou that Betancourt has degenerated terrifically since his rookie year, and that KC got taken. Unless Yuni makes a radical and long term change, he is just another out-maker who shouldn’t wear a glove, which is becoming par for the course for the Royals, altely.
I do not believe I’ve ever seen a greater demeaning done to a baseball player than for the dismal Royals to lock in the phenomenal Grienke to, not a ‘bad’ team but an ATROCIOUS team, not likely to be much better for the foreseeable future! Were it not for the disastrous bunch called ‘teammates’, Grienke should, at this juncture, be something like 15-2, maybe better. He should definitely be able to sue for non support!!!!!
And, KC goes out and makes such exgtraordinary pickups as Betancourt, Anderson, Colon…. That’ll change their future, Dayton!! And, you want to talk trading the likes of Teahan?!?!?!