March 7, 2003

Breaking Balls

Getting Defensive: Advanced Concepts

by Derek Zumsteg

In Part One, I took a walk through the big fielding stats: errors and fielding percentage, Range Factor, and Defensive Average/Zone Rating. Here, we'll talk about three of the more advanced fielding statistics.

In 1984 the coolest book ever was published, The Hidden Game of Baseball. Written by Pete Palmer and John Thorn, The Hidden Game gave birth to Linear Weights, a system that translates each event on the field into a value in runs. Linear Weights would go on to become the basis of Total Baseball's signature stat, TPR, which is derived from a combination of Batting Runs (offensive performance) and Fielding Runs (yep, you guessed it, glovework).

Fielding Runs uses different formulas for different positions to come up with a number for each position that's then compared to the league average for that position. For example, a first baseman's Fielding Runs might be calculated as .20(2A-E), which should raise an eyebrow immediately: If a first baseman tosses the ball to the pitcher every time because he's too slow to get to the bag, he gets credit toward a Fielding Run. But if he takes it back himself, he doesn't. And don't think that this doesn't happen in real life--as Clay Davenport noted in Baseball Prospectus 2002, Bill Buckner is an example of someone who sees his Fielding Runs driven through the roof because of this. In contrast, if a first baseman has good range and hands, and snags a lot of line drives for outs, he would get no credit for those putouts.

Then Fielding Runs divides up the credit for those runs (or lack thereof) through unspecified technical means involving playing time as measured in plate appearances and "each player's entire fielding record." Total Baseball offers the formula for calculating an infield player's contributions as:

FR = .20 (PO+2A-E+DP) by player - LgAvg * (PO, team-K, team) * (inn. by player / inn. by team)

Again, we're up against the problems we hit before: while I can explain what the Fielding Wins (Fielding Runs/10, essentially) column in Total Baseball is supposed to measure (the "number of games a player won or lost for their team with their fielding over the season") it is still not a stat I can calculate easily while I'm at a ballgame.

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