Evaluating Outfielder Throwing Ability

All of our previous SAFE fielding evaluations have only focussed on the ability to make outs on balls in play. However, another dimension of fielding is the evaluating performance of throwing events by individual players. We have just finished an analysis that quantifies the relative throwing ability of each individual outfielders by tracking all throwing opportunities in the 2002-2005 seasons and evaluating the relative success of each fielder relative to the league average on the scale of runs saved/cost.

The Run Expectancy Matrix provides us with expected runs for each game situation, which we can use to calculate a runs saved/cost value for a particular successful or unsuccessful play. For outfielders, we want to measure ability to throw out baserunners trying to take extra bases, as well as keeping baserunners from trying to take extra bases. We tabulate the runs saved/cost for every outfielder in each of four seasons of ball-in-play data (2002-2005) and then average across all four seasons (taking into account differences in opportunities between seasons).

The table below gives the ten best and ten worst outfielder arms, in terms of average runs saved/cost in throwing events.

Ten Best Outfielder Arms

Name	Runs Saved
1 . Edmonds Jim	8.718
2 . Jones Jacque	8.659
3 . Taveras Willy	8.074
4 . Johnson Kelly	7.772
5 . Sullivan Cory	7.372
6 . Chavez Endy	6.524
7 . Guerrero Vladimir	6.197
8 . Hidalgo Richard	6.181
9 . Hunter Torii	5.974
10 . Walker Larry	5.852

Ten Worst Outfielder Arms

Name	Runs Cost
1 . Brown Emil	-16.783
2 . Pierre Juan	-10.769
3 . Lawton Matt	-9.428
4 . Sanchez Alex	-7.793
5 . Holliday Matthew	-7.341
6 . Crawford Carl	-7.111
7 . DeJesus David	-6.996
8 . Williams Bernie	-6.785
9 . White Rondell	-6.559
10 . Magee Wendell	-5.973

The full results for outfielders can be downloaded here. I'll post another entry soon that applies the same methodology to the throwing ability of catchers in base-stealing opportunities.