Quote:
Originally Posted by Splitter24
Actually, it doesn't quite work that way, either. There's no baseball equivalent to the cornerback in football who people don't throw at. Clemente would rack up 20 assists per year even though everybody knew how good his arm was. Jesse Barfield, same thing: 16-20 assists per year despite having an arm that should've been registered with the local authorities.
Just like a lot of numbers, raw outfield assist totals in of themselves have to be placed in context with the player and the position.
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It absolutely works like that today with a lot more data. Teams know who to run on and who not to. Maybe teams were really dumb 50 years ago over and over again, but I also find that hard to believe. After a certain point, it's just plain stupid to get thrown out again and again against someone with a great arm, even without any helpful data. Each assist is just about meaningless without analyzing what happened. If someone gets thrown out by 40 feet, the fielder deserves almost no credit because the assist was caused by being a terrible base runner.
And then you see an assist like this and it's worth about 10 normal assists because of how amazing it was. Other RFs probably throw out Kemp on that play about 1% of the time if that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ele_6M4rUHQ