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July 18, 2012

Manufactured Runs

Getting Shifty Again

by Colin Wyers

A while back, you may recall, I wrote an article about Brett Lawrie’s rating in one defensive metric, Baseball Info Solution’s Defensive Runs Saved. My conclusion:

So let’s play around with this basic framework and see how far it takes us. It helps to have some sample data to play around with. Again, we don’t have access to the raw data underpinning DRS. For the purposes of illustrating this point, however, any zone data should do, and the most convenient source of that is from Project Scoresheet. This is what the Project Scoresheet field diagram looks like:

I have consolidated the “S” and “D” zones with the primary zone, so for instance 5D is lumped in with 5—this way we pay attention only to the horizontal spray angle of the data. So here are third baseman play made rates on ground balls for each of those zones, from 1995 (no particular reason for that year):

LOC_TX	PM_RT
5	0.5889
56	0.3506
6	0.0220
6M	0.0031
4M	0.0017
4	0.0013
34	0.0022
3	0.0055

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