Manny is teh awesome.

hey, if jeter can win one ...

He's no Bob "Wondernutt" Zupcic.

Yep, Manny would have camped under the ball to save preserve Billy Rohr's no hitter (until Ellie broke it in the ninth). Manny would not have had to dive for the ball like Yaz.

As for Ramirez’ other Fenway innovation - playing closer to the infield dirt than The Wall - the Red Sox asked that he put that away for a while.

“They told me to play back,” Ramirez said. “I figured when I play in Boston anything that was hit over my head was a hit, so I catch everything that might be base hits. But if they want me to play back, I’ll play back.”

Fun with THT (Dewan) fielding stats for LF:

1. Take the number of missed plays in zone, plus plays made out of zone, and divide by innings, to get a sense of how out of position each player might be playing generally. Call it "out of position stat", or OOPS. (A low OOPS means any number of things, but a very high OOPS suggests to me that a player might be out of position, making plays a LF usually doesn't and missing plays a LFer usually gets.)

Manny, 2007: 0.104 OOPS (high)
Manny, 2008: 0.050 OOPS (low, but inconsequential)

In 2008 his rate of plays out of zone, and his rate of missing plays in zone, have dropped. There's been speculation that Dewan or his observers are counting things differently at Fenway this year, but Manny not playing "deep shortstop" could explain some of this as well.

FWIW, Ellsbury, Hinske, and Pena also had Mannyesque OOPS in LF last year. Pena was atrocious, and from what I could tell last year neither Hinske nor Ellsbury had any good sense of how to play that territory at Fenway. (Ellsbury had a decent OOZ rate in LF, but it was only one play better than Manny's OOZ rate.) Kielty and Moss were fine out there.

2. There are around 40 players who played at least 325 innings in LF last year. The most likely out of position, based on OOPS:

David Dellucci, CLE: 0.105 OOPS (25 missed in zone, 15 made out of zone, 382 innings)
Manny Ramirez, BOS: 0.104 OOPS (68 MIZ, 35 OOZ, 994 Inn)
Emil Brown, KC: 0.097 OOPS (22 MIZ, 37 OOZ, 606 Inn)
Joey Gathright, KC: 0.096 OOPS (16 MIZ, 34 OOZ, 519 Inn)
Jason Michaels, CLE: 0.090 OOPS (18 MIZ, 27 OOZ, 499 Inn)

Given that the top 5 includes both KC LFers and two of three major CLE LFers, I suppose there could be park and/or scorer effects. But (a) Kenny Lofton had a low OOPS in LF for Cleveland, in slightly more innings than Dellucci; and (b) consistent numbers here could represent consistency in how the team positions its players. That, and Tango's SRBTFFTF has Dellucci and Brown as being observationally bad in LF, and Gathright with bad instincts and hands.

Based on the numbers above it might seem that Brown, Gathright, and Michaels are getting penalized for a lot of OOZ plays. But in the case of Brown and Michaels, their MIZ rate is still relatively high (top quartile). Gathright is more middle-of-the-pack on MIZ, so maybe he is being unfairly penalized. (And if he is out of position, he appears to have the speed to make up for it.)

Anyway, here's the top 5 for 2008 in a comparable-size list (using 90 innings as the cutoff):

Garret Anderson, LAA: 0.111 OOPS (8 MIZ, 12 OOZ, 180 inn)
Gary Matthews Jr., LAA: 0.104 OOPS (8 MIZ, 6 OOZ, 134 inn)
Mark Teahen, KC: 0.097 OOPS (9 MIZ, 8 OOZ, 175 inn)
David Dellucci, CLE: 0.096 OOPS (6 MIZ, 13 OOZ, 198 inn)
Jason Michaels, CLE: 0.093 OOPS (2 MIZ, 7 OOZ, 97 inn)

OK, so KC and Cleveland are still near the top of the pack. But what's going on with the Angels? Are these guys not covering the line any more?

FWIW, Emil Brown has a better OOPS this year, but mostly due to lower OOZ. He's among the worst in-zone. Gathright hasn't played LF this year, but his CF numbers for MIZ are pretty low - again, suggesting he was unfairly penalized by OOPS.

3. Were I to take this seriously, I'd have come up with something less junky than this.

Manny also thinks he has a great shot at winning his first Cy Young Award this year.

The Boston Globe Red Sox Notes:

Manny Ramírez, meanwhile, spent a couple of minutes in the clubhouse trying to convince reporters the Sox should trade Tavarez for one of Milwaukee's sausages, the stars of the race that occurs prior to every seventh inning in Miller Park. That was after he announced that Tavarez should be traded to Tampa Bay.

Manny *should* have a high OOPS - he plays a lot closer to the infield than his counterparts. That's one reason for all his assists.

anyone have a link to Manny's +/- or ZR numbers when he's not playing home games? i have no doubt that he's a poor fielder, he just doesn't LOOK historically awful like the numbers say he is.

In other news, Tony Pena Jr. has announced he is gunning for this years Silver Slugger award at shortstop.

Manny traditionally leads the league in OOPS

anyone have a link to Manny's +/- or ZR numbers when he's not playing home games? i have no doubt that he's a poor fielder, he just doesn't LOOK historically awful like the numbers say he is.

Sox Theraphy had something on this a few months ago:

Stadium G GS Ch INN PO A E DP ZR PM Diff RS RS/162
Road 58 58 112 476 94 1 1 0 .830 93 -5 -4 -13
Home 61 61 136 509 86 7 1 0 .618 84 -31 -25 -72

Those last two columns are RS and RS/162, based on Chris Dial’s method for converting raw ZR into run values. So in 2007, Manny was -13 runs/162 on the road and -72/162 at home. We can see the pretty obvious effect of the weird scoring at Fenway, wherein the ZR guys, for some crazy reason, count balls off the wall as being in a player’s zone. The data above suggests that Manny is a lot closer to the -10 to -15 defender that many people here have been saying he is. But there’s more information to consider. SG’s also provide me with what other LF did in Fenway and way from Fenway:

Fenway (All LF)
Chances: 382
Plays Made: 262
Zone Rating: .686

non-Fenway (All LF)
Chances: 4801
Plays Made: 4208
Zone Rating: .876

These numbers allow us to compare Manny in Fenway to other players in Fenway, rather than comparing him to an average player in an average park. Plug in the visiting players’ ZR into Manny’s chances and they make about 9 more plays than he did. Extrapolate that out to a full season and he’s at -21 at home/162 (and still -13 on the road). About -17 overall.

MGL posted his road UZR's also a few months ago, here

-20 on road and -45 at home, assuming 179 games at home also (I don't know if this is correct).

Whether that "suggests" something "wrong" on the park factors, I really have no idea. Obviously both home and road are going to fluctuate so that the chance they are almost exactly the same is small.

I don't do a very good job of doing the park factors at Fenway, or more accurately speaking, the way I do the park factors is not tremendously applicable to Fenway, although probably not THAT bad.

Doesn't really matter. All evidence points to him being one of the worst fielders in baseball. Whether that is 11 or 30 runs bad, I don't really know (and that is a big difference, 11 or 30). If someone put a gun to my head, I would probably say -15 bad.

KC's making an effort to play the outfielders short this year and cut off bloop hits. I haven't heard any updates in a while, but Hillman talked about it a few times at the beginning of the year.

Manny also thinks he has a great shot at winning his first Cy Young Award this year.

"Hey, if Bartolo Colon can win one, why not me?"