Gold Gloves .. can it be quantified?

[tzill]

Without looking at UZR, here's who my NL gold gloves would be from watching with my eyes only:

C - Y. Molina
1B - A. Gonzalez
2B - Utley
SS - Tulowitzki
3B - Zimmerman
OF - Bourn
OF - Torres
OF - McCutchen

Pretty good list, and I wouldn't be upset if any of those guys won the GG. However, you really should take a look at Ike Davis of the Mets -- he's amazing.

 

[tzill]

lol, don't be sorry dude, I'm just an idiot.

I'll just sit here, alone in the dark, unwanted and unappreciated....

 

[SFAnthem]

Awesome. Marketing degree?

Thanks, Heath. But that's pretty much all I have for creativity...*lacks secondary pitch* Finance, actually.

I still ask myself why I went that route..all the hot girls are in marketing.

 

[gp956]

I've found UZR to be pretty helpful in evaluating players. Ramirez and Pennington were far and away the AL league leaders at SS, with Jeter coming in a distant seventh.

GGs are a crock of shit.

UZR is better than nothing, but the fact it resolves to a single number leads some to believe it is more precise than it really is. Bottom line, it still relies on spotters and judgment calls on ball flight and location. Plus the algorithm makes some adjustments for the type of pitcher (gb/fb ratio) and whether the ball is directed towards the opposite field, which, as tweaks made over the years have showed, can change the ranking of fielders. You need about 3 years of data before it approaches the accuracy of an old school eye watching 80 games or so, imo.

I'm a fan of the approach, but think the accuracy is way over sold. In any case, it's soon to be made obsolete by field f/x.

 

[TidrowThePitchingMaster]

UZR is better than nothing, but the fact it resolves to a single number leads some to believe it is more precise than it really is. Bottom line, it still relies on spotters and judgment calls on ball flight and location. Plus the algorithm makes some adjustments for the type of pitcher (gb/fb ratio) and whether the ball is directed towards the opposite field, which, as tweaks made over the years have showed, can change the ranking of fielders. You need about 3 years of data before it approaches the accuracy of an old school eye watching 80 games or so, imo.

I'm a fan of the approach, but think the accuracy is way over sold. In any case, it's soon to be made obsolete by field f/x.

I googled Field/fx to see what it wasall about. Sounds pretty f*cking legit.


New Camera System Takes the Guesswork out of Baseball Stats | Popular Science

Sportvision’s FieldFX camera system records the action while object-recognition software identifies each fielder and runner, as well as the ball. After a play, the system spits out data for every movement: the trajectory of the ball, how far the fielder ran, and so on. “After an amazing catch by an outfielder, we can compare his speed and route to the ball with our database and show the TV audience that this player performed so well that 80 percent of the league couldn’t have made that catch,” says Ryan Zander, Sportvision’s manager of baseball products. That information, he says, will allow a much more quantitative measure of exactly what is an error.

I like the sound of this.

And GP- I tend to agree, sometimes we as a baseball community use UZR as an end-all be-all when comparing players defensively. I think it has value, and is currently the best system we have, but it no doubt is hardly an exact science.