Quote:
Originally Posted by The Wolf
Free lesson on what fools who rely on their eyeballs think versus hard data. In 2010, Derek Jeter won the AL shortstop Gold Glove. Data established that he was the second worst defensive shortstop (100+ games) in the game. ( Best defensive shortstops in 2010 » Baseball-Reference Blog » Blog Archive)
But almost everyone who watched him play saw him make marvelous plays. What they didn't see was that he had almost no range.
Never rely on your eyeballs; you're a bad witness. Get the facts. |
Agreed on Jeter. I never understood why people thought Jeter could field at all. Even to the naked eye he didn't show much range. All his "marvelous plays" were because he took one step, then dove. That was his range, a step and a dive. And I actually like Jeter a lot. My brother and I always liked Jeter, but even when he first came up, neither of us could understand why people thought he was a good fielder. He just wasn't/isn't.
The issue there wasn't eyeballs so much as people trying to build a mythology and then believing their own hype. That being said it is bad to rely entirely on eyeballs.
But to refer to the current generation of fielding metrics as facts shows a woeful lack of understanding of their limitations. Limitations which even their creators acknowledge and are trying to deal with.
Fielding metrics right now are just as much art as they are science. That will change in the future as more data becomes available and folks come up with better ways to interpret the data they already have. But for now, they're the best way to measure fielding we have, but they're still sadly limited.