Tiger Tales: Panas: Mid-season Fielding Bible stats

A Kibby Yewcic-ly small sample of Tiger Fielding Bible data…

The Fielding Bible data is now available on Bill James Online but it’s a subscription site. It’s a relatively new site and still a work in progress. It already provides quite a few stats which you won’t find anywhere else during the season such as the Fielding Bible data and base running data (e.g How many times did Curtis Granderson go from first to third on a single? second to home on a single? , etc.) It is still lacking in articles but they are working on that. You can figure out for yourself whether it is worth $3.00 per month by taking their free tour.

I can’t go into a great deal of detail because it’s premium content but Table 1 below presents a brief summary of the fielding data for the Tigers through yesterday. Using Placido Polanco as an example, we can see that he has a +/- of +1 meaning that he has made one play in his zone abovewhat the average second baseman has made. He ranks 11th in the majors so far. All of the Tigers regular rank roughly somewhere close to average on this stat. The biggest surprise is Granderson who usually ranks well above average of range stats. In fact, he ranked 5th in 2006 and 4th in 2007 on this particular system. The sample sizes are still small for outfielders though (especially one who missed most of April). We’ll see where he ranks after a full season of data.