August 28th, 2006 → 4:15 pm @ Seth Mnookin // No Comments
Chris Dial over at Baseball Think Factory has computed the defensive rankings for all AL players who’ve played a minimum of 500 innings. And guess what? Among center fielders, Coco comes in dead last, holding down the bottom of the order with Texas’s Gary Matthews, Jr. (Just a coincidence, but one that’s fun to point out: within a couple of days, Crisp (on June 29) and Matthews (on July 31) made two of the most memorable catches of the year.)
Crisp, according to BTF, will cost the Sox about 11 runs over the course of 150 games. This assessment is more or less backed up by ESPN’s Zone Ratings, which ranks Crisp last among regular center fielders.
Of course, BTF’s rankings, like all defensive metrics, must be taken with a grain of salt. For all the energy put into finding new ways to collect and analyze fielding data, no one has yet come up with a good way to factor Fenway’s Wall, resulting in negatively skewed numbers for any Boston left fielder. (Manny’s bad, sure…but not 41 runs bad.) In John Dewan’s fascinating Fielding Bible (worth getting just for Bill James’s essay on why Derek Jeter may be the worst fielding shortstop in history), Crisp is ranked as the second best left fielder in all of baseball for 2005 (when he played left for the Indians), and the second best in 3-year plus/minus rankings (behind Carl Crawford). And in this year’s BTF rankings, Mike Lowell comes out on top among AL third basemen, while A-Rod is dead last. Lowell’s had a good year, and his baby-soft hands and deadly accurate arm makes for fun viewing, but his range is pretty miserable. A-Rod’s made a boatload of errors, but his range is decent to good. I can buy Ichiro as the league’s best right fielder…but Vlad, hobbled as he is, as second worst? Behind Trot? (The Fielding Bible ranked Trot as the best right fielder in baseball last year and the second bet over the last three years; this, I suspect, has as much to do with Fenway’s expansive right field as Manny’s negative numbers have to do with the truncated left field.)
Anyway. Check it out. It’ll be more fun than counting down the hours to tonight’s game.
Post Categories: Coco Crisp & Defensive metrics & oblique references to Jackass
David Haglund
18 years ago
Vlad appears to me to have lost all range in RF. I don’t doubt he’s worse than Trot, and most other RFs, at this point. (His arm still looks great for the most part.)
I also don’t think that, for a 3Bmen, range is as important as quick reactions, good positioning and accurate throws. Lowell sure looks better than A-Rod to me, at least this year.
And, if I remember correctly, Troy O’Leary, of all people, in his early years with the Sox, posted decent defensive numbers in LF. I’m not sure the odd dimensions of Fenway mess with defensive stats quite as much as you suggest.
All that said, I agree with the implicit point that defensive stats are still too all-over-the-place to be trusted entirely.
On the subject of Coco in particular: perhaps more time in CF will help him improve his reads and his judgment on flyballs. I certainly hope so.
deversm
18 years ago
That lineup the Sox ran out there tonight was sweet tits.
CursedNoMore
18 years ago
It amazes me that Trot Nixon is so underrated as a Right Fielder. I have a theory. Most people determine that speed and world-class athleticism makes a great outfielder. Wrong. Those things certainly help, but more importantly, a right fielder needs great instincts — the ability to get the proper jump and angle on a ball. It is my contention that Trot Nixon doesn’t find himself making ESPN’s Web Gems because he doesn’t have to; whereas a lot of outfielders need that speed and athleticism to make up for their average instincts, and thus are seen diving to make a spectacular catch (if not letting the ball drop in front of them), Trot Nixon is making a routine catch for an easy out.
The Feeding the Monster Blog — In which the author discusses Boston, the Red Sox, the media, and very occasionally popular music. » BJCC
17 years ago
[…] Coco Crisp, on the other hand, received a fair amount of criticism for his play. Outside of at least one mind-blowing, game-saving, head-first diving catch, he looked a little lost (which mirrored how he looked at the plate). In late August, Baseball Think Factory rated him dead last among AL center fielders (tied, oddly enough, with Gary Matthews Jr., who also made an all-time highlight reel grab in early July); around the same time, ESPN’s Zone Ratings also had him at the bottom of the heap. […]