dsvitak wrote:
> Ozzie, one year, had 621 assists....by FAR the highest
> total in the history of major league baseball.
It was 1980, and it's just 20 more than Glenn Wright had which was the prior record. That's not a big gap. In contrast, Frisch held (at least as of 1997) the record for 2Bs, and his gap to #2 was 53 assists.
Of course it's Ozzie's only appearance in the Top 20 as of 1997, so it's not like he was averaging 621 a year.
> Most shortstops are going to be considered for a gold glove
> if their assist totals are above 450.
>
> So, lets assume that Ozzie made one play per game more than
> his share...in the hole, over by second. This seems reasonable,
> I saw a couple of hundred games in person with him playing,
> and he did indeed make plays no other human could make.
>
> How many runs saved is 170 fewer hits? I would estimate 60
> or so. This would work out, using standard sabremetric values
> of about 7 wins.
>
> Seems like a lot of wins, for one defensive player, above normal.
This all sounds sort of "logical", but it was debunked several decades back.
Think of it "logically" like this. In 1980, when Ozzie was saving those 60 runs, the spread between the best run prevention team and the worst run prevention team was 139 runs - 728 vs. 589. Now think all all the things that could go into have the worst vs. best. How much of the credit for that goes to the pitching staff? How much of that gets split up among the 8 fielders out there? And how much of that goes to the park?
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the top two "run prevention" teams in the NL in 1980 were the Astros and the Dodgers, or that the worst was the Cubs. The Dodgers and Astros were good teams - they went to the 163rd game to determine who took the NL West. The Cubs were a bad team - they lost 98 games. The Astro Dome played as a strong pitchers park that year, while Dodger Stadium was a "better than average" park for pitchers. Wrigley was Wrigley back then, and an excellent park for hitters that year. A *large* chunk of that 139 gap between the Astros and the Cubs was because of the parks the teams played in. That's before we get to splitting the runs between pitching and fielding, and then the fielding part between the various positions. Do you really think that any single fielder could be responsible for a 60 run gap in there?
Maybe if the Astros had Ozzie at SS and the Cubs had HoJo at SS. But HoJo was a horrific SS, so he's not a reasonable replacement level SS.
There just aren't 60 runs there to save above the average.
I don't think that any of the newer high end sabermetric methods of analyzing defense have ever been able to locate 60 defensive runs of saving at SS vs. the average or replacement level. Bill James' win shares method certainly doesn't.
On Piazza in him prime as a catcher for the Dodgers, he wasn't costing the Dodgers as many runs with defense as some people would claim in the thread. I doubt for the Mets he's ever cost them 40 runs in a season over a replacement level catcher's defense.
John