Diamond Mind Baseball Statistics Guide: Team Fielding
Finishing up the series
Diamond Mind Baseball Statistics Guide: Team Fielding
You’re probably wondering why I don’t talk about individual fielding first. There are a few reasons:
Fielding is inherently a team concept.
Numerous players play multiple positions, making the fielding charts hopelessly complex.
Fielding percentages become silly when errors are so rare.
Errors themselves are an extremely arbitrary measurement, as we’ll discuss below.
Anyway, let’s get on with it.
Team Fielding
Let’s get down to business.
Team: Team name
G: Number of games played
PO: Number of putouts, or, in other words, numbers of outs made. We should also be able to calculate this from innings pitched.
A: Number of assists
E: Number of errors.
This is where we need to talk for a second. An error is inheritely an arbitrary measure.
Wikipedia gives us a great definition of errors:
Sounds good, right? Well, remember that anything that relies on the judgment of the official scorer is going to be biased.
Errors are also problematic because there are many misplays that do not show up as errors. Again, Wikipedia has a great explanation:
This is one of the reasons why we’ve seen statistics like Total Zone Rating, Ultimate Zone Rating, and so on come up over the years. The idea is to focus on player positioning, keeping in mind that many professional baseball players have said that fielding is largely positioning. These new statistics work well if you know where the ball was hit to and where the fielder was positioned. However, they still are not particularly good at measuring subtle changes in fielding positioning in anticipation of balls hit.
Even the best advanced metrics cannot effetively measure certain aspects of fielding. For example, if a player is supposed to act as the cutoff man but doesn’t bother to go to the correct position, there is no metric I am aware of that will punish him for this.
Going back through baseball history with an eye on recreating the fielding statistical record is sheer folly. Even if you know the exact location of each hit, you’re going to have a hard time measuring fielder effectiveness without knowing where the fielder was positioned, where the fielder was in relation to other fielders, what type of pitch was thrown, and a host of other variables. This is one reason why retrospective stats such as Total Zone Rating (or Rfield) leaves the student with so many headaches. We’re essentially replacing one arbitrary statistic with an even more arbitrary statistic, one that comes up years after the fact with no real connection to what actually happened.
I strongly believe that fielding is a team measurement and not an individual measurement. The secret of understanding fielding lies in team defensive statistics, outs generated by teams, and in the fact that pitching and fielding are inseparably connected. And, yes, I am well aware that my stance is completely at odds with mainstream sabermetrics.
DP: Number of double plays. This includes both ground ball double plays and other forms of double plays.
TC: Total chances: putouts plus assists plus errors.
PCT: Fielding percentage: basically, putouts plus assists divded by total chances.
PB: Passed balls. The difference between a passed ball and a wild pitch is arbitrary, of course, and depends on the judgment of the official scorer. I’d argue that both statistics should be combined.
SB: Stolen bases allowed
CS: Runners caught stealing
SB%: Number of potential base stealers who were successful.
CPO: Number of players picked off base by the catcher (a pretty rare play).
PPO: Number of players picked off base by the pitcher.
I do want to add in closing that catching a runner attempting to steal and picking a runner off base is also a team play in its very nature. We spend a lot of time trying to split hairs to see how much we should reward the catcher for catching a runner stealing. The reality is that the catcher needs a lot of things to go right: he needs the pitcher to throw the pitch he is expecting, he needs the ball somewhere near the target, he needs the batter to not swing, he needs either the shortstop or second baseman to go to the right position to make the play, and he needs the other player to back up in case the ball gets away.
Instead of asking ourselves how to turn this into an individual statistic, we should ask ourselves why we don’t focus more on team defense.