I was going to wait until the year-end data is available, but five games really won’t make that much of a difference. Here are the number of runs saved by each Yankee fielder in 2007, compared to MLB-average at each position. The methodology is presented by Justin here.
| Last | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | CF | LF | RF | TOT |
| Damon | 3 | 9 | -1 | 12 | ||||
| Mientkiewicz | 11 | 11 | ||||||
| Phillips | 8 | 0 | 0 | 8 | ||||
| Cano | 5 | 5 | ||||||
| Duncan | 0 | 2 | 2 | |||||
| Thompson | 0 | 1 | 0 | |||||
| Phelps | 0 | 0 | ||||||
| Betemit | 0 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Basak | -1 | -1 | ||||||
| Giambi | -1 | -1 | ||||||
| Matsui | -1 | -1 | ||||||
| Gonzalez | -1 | -1 | ||||||
| Cairo | -1 | -1 | -3 | 2 | 0 | -3 | ||
| Rodriguez | -6 | -6 | ||||||
| Cabrera | -9 | 3 | 0 | -7 | ||||
| Abreu | -12 | -12 | ||||||
| Jeter | -27 | -27 | ||||||
| TOT | 18 | 3 | -31 | -5 | -6 | 11 | -11 | -20 |
Quite interesting. Outside of throwing arm, Damon is a much better fielder than Melky. 14 assists is a huge deal, but do you think that will happen going forward? Preventing runners from gaining an extra base is valuable, but a lot less valuable than completely erasing them from the basepaths. Melky’s arm this year probably moves him up about a dozen runs, but going forward, I’d say it’s only worth about five runs.
If ARod leaves the Yankees, I’m not so sure he’s a good SS option anymore, coming in as a below-average 3B.
I’d put ARod at short before Jeter, though. Holy crap he’s bad. If he were an average fielder the Yankees would be almost three wins better and be AL East champs. According to VORP, Jeter has hit 27 runs better than Brendan Harris. Harris is only a couple runs worse than average in the field, making Derek Jeter and Brendan Harris pretty much equally valuable (until you include Jeter’s intangibles, of course.) My guess is that Jeter is not a top 10 shortstop, overall, but we’ll have to wait until I run my positional recap series next week.
Of course, the above fielding values are dependent on playing time. So here’s the data pro-rated to 150 games for each player. (Specifically, I took fielding runs, divided by innings played, multiplied by 9 and multiplied by 150. Any biases for number of balls hit to a player’s zone as a function of pitchers, ballpark, or whatever have not been removed.) Small sample-size warnings are always in effect.
| Last | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | CF | LF | RF |
| Abreu | -13 | ||||||
| Basak | -147 | ||||||
| Betemit | 4 | -114 | 8 | -7 | -34 | ||
| Cabrera | -12 | 24 | -7 | ||||
| Cairo | -5 | -68 | -79 | 65 | -5 | ||
| Cano | 5 | ||||||
| Damon | 12 | 49 | -411 | ||||
| Duncan | -11 | 71 | |||||
| Giambi | -8 | ||||||
| Gonzalez | -118 | ||||||
| Jeter | -28 | ||||||
| Matsui | -1 | ||||||
| Mientkiewicz | 36 | ||||||
| Phelps | 1 | ||||||
| Phillips | 25 | 27 | 20 | ||||
| Rodriguez | -7 | ||||||
| Thompson | -9 | 34 |
How pathetic is it that the Yankees really don’t have a viable firstbaseman? Dougie and Andy Phillips can field, but not hit. Nobody else can hit like a 1B should. Betemit might just be the best option.
For the playoffs, I’d put Abreu at DH, Hideki in LF, Damon in CF, and Melky in RF. That puts the best defenders on the field, the best bats in the lineup, and leverages Damon’s fielding in CF with Melky’s arm in RF.
Thoughts on the Yankees fielders? Thoughts on the format of this data? Thoughts on its usefulness?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Share This
Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Love to see fielding data being discussed and analyzed! :) I’ll probably do a profile on the Yankees at some point, though I’m a devout Yankee-hater, so they’ll probably be the last playoff team I get to. :)
One caveat I’d throw out there on Cabrera…CF is the position where I”m the least comfortable with these data. One of the big reasons is that there’s no adjustment for batter handedness in these data (or Dewan’s +/- system, for that matter), which has a huge effect on positioning on defenders.
The other reason is that there are some enormous discrepancies between these data and UZR’s data. Grady Sizemore is one of the most commonly cited–he does very well in UZR, but does poorly with RZR, especially on balls out of zone. Sizemore has a reputation as a good defender, so I’d tend to favor UZR in this case (and UZR does have handedness info built into it). Anyway, my point is that I’d be hesitant to argue that Melky’s a bad defender at this point. …of course, we don’t have any other good data on his defense to this point either, so it’s also probably be fair to question the conventional wisdom that he’s a “good” defender either.
Another thing I’d recommend is that you consider using BIZ to calculate per-season rates instead of innings or games. One of the big advantages of these data over something like range factor is that we have an actual measure of balls hit to the defender. It seems to me like that’s the standard by which players should be compared (i.e. a typical season’s worth of chances), rather than innings or games. Just eyeballing the data, these seem like good round-number adjustments:
1B - 200 BIZ
2B - 400 BIZ
3B - 350 BIZ
SS - 400 BIZ
LF - 250 BIZ
CF - 350 BIZ
RF - 300 BIZ
Or something like that. :)
-Justin