Remember the last time you saw the Dodgers, or the team playing the Dodgers, use an infield shift on defense and thought, “how can any fielding statistics be accurate when they shift so darn much?”
No? That’s OK. Keep reading.
Shift or no shift, it’s hard to quantify a player’s defensive skill. Adjectives are better descriptors than numbers — great for me, but bad for the data folks. And data folks are everywhere. They work for front offices and agents. They’re the principal players in determining who gets paid the big bucks in free agency, who gets traded, and who gets promoted to the major leagues in spite of (not because of) their hitting ability. Data is important, and there isn’t a ton of usable defensive data today.
So, the news. MLB Advanced Media hired a new data czar (technically a Senior Database Architect of Stats), Tom Tango. In a recent interview with FanGraphs, he explained just how irrelevant things like fielding percentage, defensive runs saved and Ultimate Zone Rating are about to become:
Mitchel Lichtman has also been the leader with regards to fielding, but he will be the first to tell you the major problem he’s got is that he doesn’t know the starting position of each fielder. Statcast gives us that. I don’t know how many terabytes of data we get out of Statcast, but 50% of the value will simply be knowing where the feet of all the fielders are when the pitcher releases the ball. Just by doing that, it would essentially make all other fielding metrics obsolete.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff contained in that interview. A lot of it is stat-geeky. From a big-picture standpoint, the
