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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Book Blog: Tango: The 2008 Scouting Report, By the Fans, For the Fans

It’s that time of year again! Fans Scouting Report fever...Catch It! (you know Johnny Damon won’t)

It’s the 6th Annual Fans’ Scouting Report.

Every year, I get a jump in participation, from the first year where I had close to 500 ballots, to last year where it exceeded 2000 ballots. If you’ve enjoyed my blog, appreciated my work, or somehow wondered what you could do in return, this is it. All I ask from you is 5-10 minutes of your time, and we’ll call it even. And, if you have a blog, please, spread the word.

...I know only of gushing reports about the fielding of Paul Blair. Mickey Stanley sounds like some cross between Darin Erstad and Endy Chavez. That is based on the writings of the generation that preceded me. In my generation, I can only attest to the fielding prowess of Gary Pettis. The new generation knows as little about Pettis, as I know of Blair and Stanley. When the next generation comes along, I want to be able to point them to the Fans Scouting Report as the contemporaneous view of the fielding talents of Ichiro and Rolen. And Manny and Dunn. We can breathe life into their fielding accomplishments.

Repoz Posted: August 20, 2008 at 07:44 AM | 4 comment(s)
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1. Cris E Posted: August 20, 2008 at 10:41 AM (#2909974)

I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a defensive metrics is. And, most importantly, do not, absolutely do not, look at any numbers. I just want you to rely on your eyes. You are the scout. I need you to rely completely on your own observations.

Fill in the defensive metric:
defensive efficiency
fielding percentage
range factor
zone rating (ZR)
revised zone rating (RZR)
UZR

/snark

I've always loved this exercise. And for my purposes (can the guy catch, how's the arm, etc) it's about as accurate as the uber-detailed, three decimal place metrics available elsewhere.

2. Blackadder Posted: August 20, 2008 at 01:58 PM (#2910309)

The thing about this is, how many of Tango's readers aren't at least tangentially aware of various defensive metrics, and roughly how their own players rank? I personally can TRY to rank Yankees players as I see them, and I find myself agreeing with what the numbers tend to say about them, but I suspect that this is a case where my knowledge of the numbers is contaminating my observations.

It would be interesting to see if you did this survey with, say, fans at a ballgame, if the results would be appreciably different. If they were similar, that would be good evidence that the results are not thus contaminated.

3. Tango Posted: August 20, 2008 at 02:33 PM (#2910351)

Thanks for the support guys. I have a note on my blog, which I will quote here:

UPDATE: For anyone who entered data for any of the following players from the start of the poll 2 days ago until now (Aug 20, Wed, 2pm), please re-enter your data for those players only. I found a small bug which I quickly repaired. All other data has been properly recorded and stored. I apologize for this issue. I should have done a better job at quality control. (This only affected the first record of 11 teams.)

NYA Cano, Robinson
NYN Wright, David
OAK Crosby, Bobby
PHI Utley, Chase
PIT McLouth, Nate
SDN Gonzalez, Adrian
SEA Suzuki, Ichiro
SFN Rowand, Aaron
SLN Glaus, Troy
TBA Iwamura, Akinori
TEX Kinsler, Ian
TOR Overbay, Lyle

***

Black: there's no question of possible bias, though the bias wouldn't really be a "tango-reader" bias. The main feeder into the survey are readers of team-specific blogs. For the last two years, I've been hitting SB Nation blogs.

My guess is that most of those readers aren't even aware of UZR and its sisters, much less what the UZR is of their players in the last couple of years.

Even if they were, I'm asking for 7 specific traits that would, ideally, try to separate their overall view of a player into 7 distinct values.

Even if you think let's say that Adam Dunn is a bad hitter, if I start asking you about 5 hitting traits he has and how good/bad he is, you may not necessarily be clouded by your own bias.

That said, bias will always exist, just as it exists in batting and pitching stats themselves. We just do our best to account for it, and increase our uncertainty levels around those numbers.

4. Blackadder Posted: August 20, 2008 at 02:46 PM (#2910363)

Tango, that's interesting. I was assuming that most of the people in the survey were regular readers of your blog; getting people from team-specific sites, whose views are less likely to be contaminated by knowledge of UZR and the like, is clearly a much better way of going about it. I am pretty sure that for me personally, even when I watch a game, my judgment of the defense of the people I see is heavily influenced by what I remember of their defensive numbers, but perhaps I am extrapolating too much from my own experience. For this reason, I am not going to participate in the survey despite watching a lot of Yankees games.

In any case, even if there are issues, this is still a very valuable endeavor, providing information that as far as I know is not available elsewhere. Keep up the good work!

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Book Blog: Tango: The 2008 Scouting Report, By the Fans, For the Fans

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