skyking162

David Dejesus is a league-average center fielder and Adrian Gonzalez is a league-average first baseman, but Dejesus is obviously a more valuable defender. Why? Just imagine Gonzalez in center — ouch. In addition to comparing each player’s fielding ability to the average performance at each position, we need to compare the difficulty of positions. That’s not an easy thing to do, but I’m pretty confident in these estimates over a full season (from Tango, see below):

Positional Adjustments (runs):
CA: +10
CF: +5
SS: +5
2B: 0
3B: 0
LF: -5
RF: -5
1B: -10
DH: -15

Catchers are the most demanding position and receive the largest positive adjustment. Moving a right fielder in to catch would not only result in more passed balls and stolen bases, but a small decrease in offensive production. Catching is physically demanding.

Center fielders and shortstops are the two other tougher-than-average positions. Second base and third base are both neutral, even though third basemen hit much better.

Corner outfielders aren’t quite as bad as first basemen, a position reserved for crappy fielders and physically brittle players. DHs are actually more like 20 runs worse than average based on defensive talent, but it’s been shown that playing DH hurts on the offensive side, too.

Stats like VORP combine hitting with positional adjustments, but ignore actual fielding ability. For a total value metric, you can choose your favorite fielding system and combine it with VORP.

One argument against VORP is that hitting has nothing to do with fielding so you shouldn’t combine the two. I sort of agree — playing center field doesn’t make you a better hitter than a first baseman, but it does make your hitting more valuable. If Vlad could handle shortstop, you’d want him there, right? Different questions require different answers.

Further reading:

Cool USSMariner comments - read them all, or just those by Dave, and especially #45
Tango’s Math: 1 and 2

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.