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1. IronChef Chris Wok Posted: June 27, 2009 at 11:09 AM (#3235022)http://www.tangotiger.net/scouting/pos2008_LF.html
Lewis had a 32 for instincts (50 is average) and 84 for speed. This may be what he's seeing. Lewis may look like a guy who doesn't know what he's doing in the field, but is so much faster than the typical left fielder that he makes more plays.
"I could have cited stuff to demonstrate Rowand is having a good defensive year, but ahh...#### it. Instead the column just said he makes nice catches and had a couple quotes. Good enough."
And the eyes are not broken thing. If eyes could do the job nobody would be trying to quantify defense. Really lame.
He's always had the reputation of being a good defender, but things like UZR have varied on his actual defensive contributions from year to year. Whether that reflects actual changes in skill, or just noise within the system, it's hard to say.
With that being said, I think he's generally shown up on the plus side in most defensive metrics.
Yes, my eyeballs tell me that Lewis and Rowand are mirror images: Lewis appears to get lousy jumps and take terrible routes but he outruns the ball anyway, while Rowand looks great making a diving or sliding catch on a ball other center fielders would have put away without extra effort.
It jives, at least from my perspective, with how I thought he played in 2004 (19.0) and 2005 (18.7). He deserved the GG in the latter year, as he rarely had to leave his feet in center.
But he's never been the healthiest guy, so maybe age is hitting him earlier than most.
I was going to say - his defensive contributions have always seemed to track with how healthy he is at any given moment.
Which I can believe would make for an above-average left fielder. There are probably more Adam Dunn's being stuck in left field to keep their bats in the lineup than there are Carl Crawford's in left field, because if you've got a guy as good as Carl Crawford, 9 times out of 10, you end up putting him in CF.
I've always suspected what you wrote here, but there's no way to really test it. You can only test for bias if you know what the right answer is supposed to be. Really, that's the problem with evaluating any defensive measure - to know how accurately it measures the truth, you have to know what the truth is. But if we knew what the truth was, then we wouldn't need the defensive metric.
I agree, and it's only going to get worse now that in-season UZR is available. On the other hand, it has plenty of useful information, like what AROM wrote in #2.
There's probably some decent way to test it, but I can't think of it now. But there's certainly a good way to try to prevent such biases. You could have invitations to join the study in places that don't attract stat-head types and generally make sure that you're using about the same number of people from these and various other demographics. As it is, we're asking people who watch Conan if the Nielson ratings for the show should really be that good and also asking them if Letterman's should be that low.
As a Giants fan, I definitely agree. The reason Baggarly and some fans don't like his D is that they expect him to be Crawford, and he never will be. He's also frustrating to watch, because the mistakes he makes are so visible. He doesn't just take bad routes, he often takes two steps in the wrong direction. And he also has missed several balls this year that hit his glove.
Of course, a Dunn/Manny/Ibanez/Burrell type fielder would never even get his glove on those balls, so if he catches half of them he's still better than most. But it looks like he's failing.
-poor positioning
-poor reads on flyballs
-excellent speed
-above-average arm
The latter two qualities can create the mirage of a plus-defender at times, but in the end his delayed reactions greatly mitigate his other physical abilities. He actually reminds me a lot of a young Darryl Strawberry (on defense): athletic enough to be a great defender, but not lacks the focus/interest to translate his physical tools into above-average defense. I'm convinced that "instincts" is not immutable--players can and do develop better instincts. But it takes a real investment of time and effort to cultivate. Lewis better realize that he will never have the offense that will allow his manager to tolerate lackluster defense. If the guy wants to play anywhere close to regularly into his 30s, he needs to make defense a priority or else he'll be relegated to 4th outfielder status (at best). As it is, on almost any other MLB team he'd be a bench player.
As for Rowand, the guy's been between an average and above-average defensive CFer for most of his career. Last year was the first were he had been below-average and, based on a half of 2009, it looks like that might have just been a blip. His TTL is probably around dead-average, so 0.9 UZR/150 is reasonable.
The design of it helps to mitigate the problem of people rating based on the stats. You aren't grading their overall defense, but skills such as speed, throwing, instincts, etc. When judging speed I don't even pay attention to fielding, but use the surest way to measure pure speed: home to first when running all out on a grounder.
Fred Lewis had a very good UZR last season, and yet the fans still rated his instincts very low. Actually, his overall rating is about the same as Jason Bay, who had a terrible UZR (even before he got to Fenway).
When I see a ball off the bat part of my head immediately classifies it as an easy out, a tough play, or a hit. On balls to left, Lewis surprisingly often runs down what I assumed would be hits, to left anyhow. Sorta the opposite of Jack Cust, who has always impressed me with his ability to turn easy outs into hits wherever he plays. Dunn might be worse, though. He has the range of a rusty fire hydrant.
It is an interesting question -- is the ability to quickly track a fly ball and discern its trajectory, so that you can intersect it, something that can be learned, or is part of some innate skill in sensing spacial relationships? Probably some where in between, of course, such that some people are always going to have an in-born natural advantage. I wonder if there are any physiological studies that would shed light on this.
Whether that reflects actual changes in skill, or just noise within the system, it's hard to say.
Some of the people doing this work point out that fielders get so many fewer chances in a year than, say, plate appearances, that it takes a lot more data to reach a statistically significant conclusion. To the extent that fielding skill in the outfield may be even more dependent on physical condition and raw speed than hitting, you are constanty aiming at a moving target.
That's not instincts though, that's insight.
Same difference though.
Well I'm sure at some level it's not teachable/learnable/whatever. Players with "high baseball IQs" (Bonds would rank near the top of this list, as would Ripken/Larkin) seem to react instantaneously when the ball was hit. They just got a great read on the trajectory. Split-second anticipation/analysis might be an unlearnable skill, but there's quite a bit of distance somewhere in between that and a fielder who gets absolutely terrible reads (like Lewis). Watching them play a routine fly is at times as bad as watching a good amateur fielder: it literally takes them a second or two to observe the ball in-flight before calculating the trajectory and distance. An outfielder with good "instincts" or whatever seems to nearly be in position by the time the poor fielder has started to react.
That's not instincts though, that's insight.
Same difference though.
Well that's why I put "instincts" in quotes... it's not the term that I would choose, but it seems to be the must common for the early/involuntary read.
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