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March 13, 2013

Skewed Left

Saberizing the Gold Gloves

by Zachary Levine

So we won this weekend. At least I think we won. At least I think they told me we won.

It was announced that the Gold Glove Awards will add a metric component to the traditional voting of major-league managers and coaches, a presumed victory for everyone who prefers the analytical and objective over the judgment of the human eye.

So why no celebration in this virtual household, which stands for just that?

First of all, the release didn’t give much information about the metric itself. Here’s a portion of the release from the Society for American Baseball Research:

As part of the multi-year collaboration beginning with the 2013 season, SABR will develop an expanded statistical resource guide that will accompany the Rawlings Gold Glove Award ballots sent to major league-level managers and coaches each year. In addition, SABR will immediately establish a new Fielding Research Committee tasked to develop a proprietary new defensive analytic called the SABR Defensive Index™, or SDI™. The SDI will serve as an “apples-to-apples” metric to help determine the best defensive players in baseball exclusively for the Rawlings Gold Glove Award and Rawlings Platinum Glove Award selection processes
.…
Beginning in 2013, the managers/coaches vote will constitute a majority of the Rawlings Gold Glove Award winners’ selection tally, with the new SDI comprising the remainder of the overall total. The exact breakdown of the selection criteria will be announced once the SDI is created later this summer.

In other words, they’re working on it.

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21 comments have been left for this article.

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code of conduct

bluesman98

So from the defensive metric numbers from last year we are to conclude that Alfonso Soriano is a better defensive player than Carlos Gonzalez. And not just a little better--a whole lot better.
What a complete joke.
While there is some merit to what you all do with the defensive metrics. When a result like the above comes out--you need to take a serious look at what you are doing.

Mar 13, 2013 06:24 AM

rating: -3

Behemoth

Or possibly you need to re-examine your own prejudices as well? It's always possible your eye is not the ultimate best way of determining defensive competence.

Mar 13, 2013 06:43 AM

rating: 6

Drungo

So what would you do when the metrics don't agree with your subjective observations? Veto the numbers? Have a subjective fudge factor? Invalidate all metrics that have outliers and idiosyncracies?

Nobody believes Darin Erstad was a .355 hitter, so while there's some merit in what people are trying to do with offensive metrics, when a result like that comes out someone needs to take a serious look at what they're doing.

Mar 13, 2013 06:53 AM

rating: 3

whichthat

The Erstad example illustrates the problem here.

Batting average is a very simple stat that measures exactly one thing. What it says about Erstad's merits as a player is up for debate, but it is a factual statement that for one season, 240 of his 676 of his at-bats ended with a hit.

Advanced fielding metrics incorporate a lot of things and reflect various weightings and interpretations. I can't compute UZR without a spreadsheet -- come to think of it, I can't compute it AT ALL because it includes proprietary data.

Mar 13, 2013 10:41 AM

rating: 2

BarryR

Bingo. If just one of these two methodologies said that Soriano was the best LF, I would have just thought it was some bizarre systemic anomaly and ignored it. But when both of them say it I have wonder what caused this to happen - I mean Alfonso Soriano...really? The problem is that I can't see the numbers, I can't see if there is a flaw they have in common, or if they are really meaningful. I just have to trust that these things work. I don't trust FRAA, so I am dubious that their inclusion in the Gold Glove (or Platinum Glove, whatever that is) voting will be useful.

Mar 13, 2013 18:46 PM

rating: 2

whichthat

That reliance on trust is the ultimate problem. And it ties in with Russell Carleton's piece from Monday. If Rafael Palmeiro 1999 is a damning indictment of the current voting structure, shouldn't we consider Alfonso Soriano 2012 a serious shortcoming for FRAA and UZR?

Mar 13, 2013 21:26 PM

rating: 0

BarryR

I don't think so. Palmaeiro won a popularity poll which he shouldn't have even qualified for; Soriano is based on statistical evidence, which carries a degree of objectivity.
Soraiano was the leader in those two statistical measures,that is just a fact. The question is how worthwhile a fact that is, which depends on how much faith you have in those respective statistics as a measure of defensive value.

By the way, the system in these comments needs fixing, Just because bluesman98's comment received a certain number of negative votes it was grayed out. Given that it was only a -4, that seems extreme to me, but worse, since it started the thread, graying it out took this whole thread with it. That is asinine, as this is a fairly interesting discussion. I voted bluesman back up, in an attempt to restore the thread. Please fix this.

Mar 13, 2013 22:12 PM

rating: -1

Dave Pease

BP staff

(2)

Barry, the "hidden" comment floor is -4, but if it makes you feel any better, hidden comments are quite widely read at BP.

Mar 14, 2013 09:26 AM

Adam Hobson

Or you can read the entire article:

"One-year defensive metrics are notoriously unstable—Alfonso Soriano’s 7.9 FRAA in 2012 came after a -6.4 in 2011 and a -8.0 in 2012."

...

"The stats say Soriano, always thought to be a poor defender, was the most accomplished left fielder in the league last year. The stats say a part-time player was the most accomplished center fielder in the league last year.

Is a statistic that research says can take three years to stabilize really the one we want imprinted on a single-season award?"

Mar 13, 2013 07:41 AM

rating: 11

JimmyJack

I have never been confident with any defensive stats.

In my opinion, the Gold Gloves should be a collected vote by advance scouts. This is what they do for a living. They would know best.

Mar 13, 2013 08:41 AM

rating: 5

Gordon

As I understand it, the exact use of the fielding stats won't be known and will be one component of the voting. If I were to do it, I'd use some sort of agglomeration of the statistical fielding metrics for that component of the voting.

Mar 13, 2013 08:44 AM

rating: 0

dbiester

Isn't SDI the Reagan-initiated "Star Wars" defense against ICBMs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

Mar 13, 2013 09:26 AM

rating: 1

BarryR

That was my exact thought when I saw the little TM next to it. How can you trademark an acronym which already has historical significance?

Mar 13, 2013 16:41 PM

rating: 0

ScottyB

We need something like confidence intervals around our stats. If Soriano's defense is rated 7.9 (8.7 - 2.5) it gives better context.

Mar 13, 2013 10:54 AM

rating: 0

Ben Lindbergh

BP staff

We can do that, and have done that (see this article by Colin Wyers, for instance). It makes sense. The potential problem with doing that is that you run the risk of confusing people who expect to see one number, and it's also sort of a pain from a display standpoint.

Mar 13, 2013 11:08 AM

Nathan Aderhold

What about displaying as a range rather than three separate numbers, perhaps in graph form?

Something like this -- http://robslink.com/SAS/democd6/col8.png -- but inverted so the ranges are horizontal.

Mar 13, 2013 13:16 PM

rating: 0

rweiler

You could order the players at each position by UZR and FRAA, weight by rank order and use the sum of the weighted scores or something like that. My big problem with any of the defensive metrics is that they jump around so much season to season. That might just be due to nagging injuries, or it could be that they are just fundamentally flawed.

Mar 13, 2013 12:40 PM

rating: 1

Chucko

I hear you 100%. The tendency for these things to generate ratings which run the gamut is hard to grab ahold of as a fan with limited sabermetric understanding (meaning myself). Taking it two steps further and urging casual fans and old-school managers to adopt it is going to lead to fireworks. Boring, boring fireworks.

That said, the idea that this year-to-year instability in the metrics is a definitively bad result strikes me as arbitrary and sorta silly (not directed at you, rweiler - hope that's obvious). Why is it that we can't handle volatility among our star defensive players? We see it in Cy Young and MVP ballots, so why do we expect fielding to create different results? I am more than willing to believe that defensive ability is not simply a flat, innate talent. Given that variables like health, park effects, weather, opponents lineups, etc. all factor into every single play, it would be funny to expect consistent annual results. And this is even before the bias of the observer (e.g. the bias towards the flashy play instead of the smooth play) is recognized as playing a larger role in how we judge defense vs. hitting and pitching. I'd think we should be MORE skeptical of an award which features the same names year in and year out in this instance. But that's not how we're trained to see our star athletes, so it'll be a hard sell all the same.

Mar 13, 2013 14:02 PM

rating: 4

rweiler

The problem is that we do see considerable year to year stability in pitching and hitting metrics, though pitching metrics are substantially more variable due to injuries. That doesn't seem to be the case with fielding metrics.

Mar 13, 2013 15:46 PM

rating: 0

R.A.Wagman

This.
Why can't we just accept that fielding events took place, and whatever else happened, these events may not accurately gauge a player's innate fielding ability. Just something that he did - like driving in a baserunner.

Mar 13, 2013 20:11 PM

rating: 1

Cecilia Tan

BP staff

I suppose the philosophical question at the heart of the debate is what is the Gold Glove award *for*? If it's to say "this guy had the best defensive performance in a given year" then the fact that a guy is "usually" not a great defender is irrelevant if that year he gets the best "score" by some metric.

In the ideal world, we'd have a metric that correlated to defensive ability, but in the real world maybe defensive *performance* is simply volatile season to season.

Mar 21, 2013 12:45 PM

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