All that glitters …

My wife, author of the Internet’s most popular blog about our two children, has been on me for quite some time to make my blog posts shorter. This, of course, goes against the money back guarantee offered in the blog title. But she may have a point.

When I look through the comments on my various posts (only after deleting the 7,473 spam comments from “people” like Annette Bening and Jennie Finch who are trying to get you to click on some ad that would probably infect your computer with a death virus — what the hell kind of world do we live in anyway?), I notice that they are all over the place. There is no line of reasoning to them because, frankly, there is no line of reasoning to the posts themselves.

I’m not sure this is a bad thing - I actually like it better when there is no line of reasoning. But for fun, I’m going to break up what was going to be an enormous fielding post in several smaller posts, so you can specifically tell me that I’m wrong rather than say it in a more general way. Hey, life’s an adventure.

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I’m one of 10 voters (or voting entities) for the Fielding Bible Awards, a semi-new fielding award which has been listed in The Bill James Handbook the last couple of years. Because of this, I’m probably not going to be viewed as the most unbiased source when it comes to fielding awards. Of course, as Chiefs coach Herm Edwards says, that’s OK. I’m not unbiased. I think the Fielding Bible Awards, while not perfect (how perfect could it be if I’m a voter?) do a better than decent job of recognizing the best fielders in baseball. And I think the Gold Gloves, generally speaking, do not.

The Gold Glove — to paraphrase what Charles Foster Kane said about the New York Chronicle — is a good idea for an award. Every year managers and coaches, folks who you would expect to know something about fielding, vote on defensive excellence. LIke I say, this sounds good — just like having college coaches vote for the Top 25 in football sounds good. In reality, though, there are all sorts of horror stories about about college football coaches having their wives vote for them or sending in the same ballot every week no matter what happens or coaches voting for their friends — it quickly turns into a high school election for president. The Coach’s Poll is often a mess.

Managers and coaches aren’t much different. I’m not going to speculate here on what biases they bring to the table (I’ll do that a little later), but I do know that as a group, they swing and miss an awful lot on the Gold Gloves.

In addition to biases, there are also quirks in the voting:

1. Managers are not allowed to vote for their own players. On the one hand, this makes sense because you don’t want managers feeling obligated, and you don’t want that sort of conflict of interest if you can help it. On the other hand, it’s all conflict of interest, isn’t it? Managers like some players more than others, they face some players more than others, they have some players make dazzling plays against them while others make horrendous errors. Plus it seems kind of silly to me that Whitey Herzog could not vote for Ozzie Smith

2. As far as I know (and they do not release Gold Glove voting totals so I could be wrong here), managers and coaches only vote for one person at each position. I don’t believe there’s a point system like there is for the Cy Young (where voters choose a Top 3) or the MVP (where voters choose a Top 10).

If that’s true then you could easily have a scenario where you have 14 managers, and they vote for eight different players, and one guy happens to get named three times so he wins even if the other 11 managers happen to believe he’s a butcher. I suspect that’s what has happened with some of the more absurd Gold Glove choices such as Rafael Palmeiro winning.

3. The managers are supposed to choose the best fielders at every position. But when it comes to outfield they simply pick three outfielders rather than pick a left fielder, center fielder and right fielder. This means that left fielders almost never win the award. This year, three center fielders won Gold Gloves in the American League, three more in the National League. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

As pointed out here before, they should just do the same thing for infield and pick four shortstops every year.

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So, now, let’s break it down position by position, Gold Gloves vs. Fielding Bible Awards. Before we go, though, I want to briefly explain what I call the Dewan Score — John Dewan’s plus/minus system for fielders. I use the Dewan Score a lot.

John, you might know, is the guy who came up with the Fielding Bible Awards. Before that, though, he came up with a fascinating way to measure fielding.

To sum up as quickly as possible, Dewan and his crew look at every single batted ball this season. They then categorize it on their computer — they rate the type of batted ball (line drive? grounder? looper? fly ball?), how hard it was hit, and the precise location of the ball (I think he actually marks the spot on a computer with a stylus). Then, they credit the player who made the play or discredit the player who didn’t.

For instance, a medium-speed ground ball is hit three steps to the left of shortstop. Derek Jeter does not make the play, because Jeter has not made a play to his left in five years. Dewan punches the information into his computer and sees that 54 percent of the the time, a major league shortstop will make that play. So Jeter gets a -.54 (that is 0 minus the .54 percent of major leaguers who make the play — thank you to Aryeh for correcting the original version of this).

We can also look at it positively, a line drive is hit to right center. Carlos Beltran gets a great jump on it, chases it down, dives and makes the catch. Dewan punches the info into his computer and sees that major league center fielders catch that ball only 12 percent of the time. So that’s a +.88 for Beltran.

Dewan than totals up all the plusses and all the minuses and comes up with a grand total plus/minus total for each player.

So if someone has, say, a +20 Dewan Score, that means that he (loosely speaking) made about 20 more plays during the year than the average fielder would have made. If he’s -20, he made about 20 fewer players in a year than the average fielder would have made.

Sorry for the extended explanation — I’m sure you already knew all this and were bored out of your mind — but I wanted to get it down that this is probably the most intensive and extensive study of fielding available to the public. I mean these guys rate EVERY SINGLE BALL HIT ALL YEAR. Their conclusions might be off, but we’re dealing with some seriously involved study and data here. Because of this, I lean very heavily on the Dewan Score.

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Oh, wait, one more thing. Here are the 10 voters for Fielding Bible Awards.

– Bill James. You know him.
– BIS Video Scouts. These are the guys who look at every batted ball.
– Hal Richman. The genius behind Strat-o-Matic baseball and one of America’s leading experts on baseball defense (as anyone who has played a shortstop with a 3 defensive rating can tell you).
– Me
– John Dewan
– Mat Olkin. He’s the Mariners player Acquisition Consultant, which is a cool title, and a longtime baseball writer.
– Mike Murphy. A Chicago radio talk show host, one of the best from what I hear.
– Joel Kammeyer. Oversees the BIS Video work.
– Rob Neyer. ESPN.com baseball guru and fine baseball author.
– Tom Tango Fan Poll. The results from the fan poll taken at TangoTiger.

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