A couple years ago, The Fielding Bible took baseball by storm with John Dewan's Plus/Minus system to evaluate fielders. This year, he's back at it with The Fielding Bible--Volume II in which he takes all the metrics created in the original volume and distills them into Defensive Runs, a statistic that can show how good a player is at preventing runs.
And sure, I was understanding that he was worthy of a Gold Glove. But his overall value was well above what I would have guessed. Coco was not the 48th best player in baseball at the time. But he may very well have had the 48th most valuable season that year. He could track down balls up the middle with the best of them, and that translated into a year that many overlooked his true value, or so it seemed.
See, in a perfect world, every team would have a General Manager/Front Office that could make good moves, while spending as little money as possible. In this world, the top-tier payrolls would have a distinct advantage. If every GM was skilled at their job, and there wasn't much difference between the minds that are within each organization, then the extra money that a club would have, would play an even more significant role.
I was thinking about the multitude of TV shows that I watch and I thought it would be pretty funny and cool to pair up who I think represents a certain character best on the Red Sox. I'm not limiting this to one show (but am limiting it to shows currently on the air), so... let's check out my comparisons. In the comments, leave your own!
In 2008, J.D. Drew was hobbled by a herniated disk. The fallout is still hindering him as he is battling back soreness. While he is still able to play, I would venture a guess that Tito will rest Drew more often against tougher left-handed pitchers in favor of Rocco Baldelli.
JD Drew is a lifetime .284 hitter. If Drew only "drew" 30 walks a season then his offensive contributions would diminish greatly. What he "lacks" in batting average, Drew more than makes up for in reaching base via the walk...and of course he hits for power too.
But JD Drew has been an on base machine over his career. People's beliefs on how walks impact the game of baseball may vary. But can anyone argue that a .392 career on base percentage, isn't really, really good? That is how often Drew has reached base in his career.
17 of the starting 25 Red Sox for 2009 have much to prove this season. Of this number, 15 are rebounding from injuries which plagued 2008.
Baseball has forever been a game of statistics and over the past few decades, sabermetrics have taken this passion way beyond batting average and on-base percentage. Growing up, my family always said all you needed to do to be successful was to "build a better mouse-trap," meaning, if you can find a way to improve on existing information, to make something more efficient, you'll find success follows. Statistics in baseball are the new mouse-trap; for the most part, the numbers being used haven't changed for 100 years, they are just being manipulated in a way to provide a better benchmark to evaluate a player's value and/or worth. The end goal never changes: a better mouse-trap still kills the mouse in the end, and a better statistic still just evaluates a player, but the means or accuracy of doing so makes it special.
The problem with the evolution of statistics in baseball has been the public acceptance of them. I'd be just as willing to bet that Woodrow Wilson and his friends talked about Babe Ruth's batting average in 1915 as I would bet that Barack Obama won't discuss the VORP of David Ortiz in 2009. Some statistics resonate through the general public and become part of the casual fan's conversation, and some don't. The "stickiness" of a stat depends on how complicated it is to understand, calculate, or relate to something the average fan can appreciate.
The numbers being thrown around by stat heads these days are often hard to grasp. Even an easy concept, such as Batting Average on Ball In Play, can be misunderstood and misused, as I demonstrated during my fourth outfielder series. Okay, so we all agree that batting average is a horrible statistic to base the value of a player on, but what metric can we all agree on that makes sense? Fortunately for us, Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs, has put together an eight part series on Win Values.
A month ago, Chris Dutton and Peter Bendix collaborated together to come up with a new statistic -- xBABIP. For batters, a .300 BABIP is not a reliable benchline (as it is for pitchers), nor is there one standard benchline across all batters. They have to be personalized, which Dutton and Bendix did.
David Ortiz looks to be in line for a monster regression to the mean... except in this case, regression is a good thing. You can expect a .300 average as a reasonable forecast next year for Big Papi.
Check out the numbers behind the reasoning for Big Papi, plus some interesting numbers on Jason Bay, Julio Lugo and others...
Bill James has come out with his new handbook for 2009, and in the handbook are the early statistical projections for players next year. This may be especially significant in the case of the Red Sox, as James has a vast amount of knowledge of players in the Red Sox system due to being employed by the team.