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This article carries my vote for the Fielding Bible Awards, as revealed today in Sports Info Solutions. But first, if you forgive, you will throw away the long.
For as long as baseball has had defensive metrics, they have been slandered. You see in the first box of results, how Alexander Cartwright invaded, how to assign the proper amount of virtue and sin to the gradation; totals for put-indicates, assists, errors complete the train space. Numerals has always won in the unspeakable, especially in a sport so dependent on the archeology of television scores for its information that it provides any support to the often-confronting eyewitnesses of the day. Much of the rest of the information has fallen out – perhaps unfortunately, since the projects created, and its logical next level of defensive efficiency, are far from the worst way to measure defensive value – and for a century our system has been condensed into a simple error, the value of Cartrwight’s system at its most elegant. The players who didn’t make mistakes were good defenders.
When advanced defenses of meter were introduced, the grands came into contempt, and the common antiphons—these figures from different sources were not even compared with each other. (Not yet, often.) But still, I get to thinking about how the Gold Gloves were decided before those metrics came along. It is certainly a base level capacity that you can easily smell, but once at the edges, it is almost invisible to the naked eye. In a way, it’s like the manager of the year vote: you can’t evaluate a defensive player’s mom during the day, or even the weekend. Every day you want to sit with him, carefully see what one guy is playing so that the other guy can’t do it at all. Then also for one good club; how do you compare it to the guy in cleveland you saw all nine years ago?
And yet we decide who this good is, because it is a small gift. We must therefore turn to numbers, and we politely ignore small disputes and greatness. Moreover, some discrepancies arise not from inaccuracy, but from philosophical differences: Do we measure pre-position as part of the help of the actors, or do we measure how difficult the story was when it took the first step? How much do we weigh the value of an outsider or arm catcher, and what do we do when it’s so good that runners don’t want to try it? Can we even believe the scorekeepers are in error anymore? Awards are subjective – a single point, perceived from a hundred different perspectives, despite the fact that metrics, with their tenths and percentiles, all look so precise and objective.
I’d rather get the environment out of the way, for my vote. Except that there will be one more thing that we may add to my declamations: my philosophy to decisions. I tend to approach each award differently. MVP and Cy Young’s individual assists, historical achievements, and especially in a limited period of time players focus more on what they “deserve” in a peripheral sense. For the Rookie of the Year, as I have shown before and will do again in a few weeks, my perspective is more the opposite: rookies cannot control their sports of time or environment, so I look more in the peripherals and the underlying characteristics, than to organize through the thread. I find that defense makes the difference. I use metrics to determine production, when folks check if something works spider sense. But these cards tend to be split by position, and players often play multiple positions, so I don’t want to use a straight calculation to reward the guy who carries around the least. Defensive skill is not a static number for me.
Let him be careful, for he invests that time. My schedule, with brief explanations behind my thought process;