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.
| 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 |
| 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.
posted by Shane @ 2:55 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Excellent stuff!
Can you explain your methodology for OF arms a bit more -- are you comparing a RF to all OF's or just other RFs?
Is a player's 4-year mean rating weighted by opportunities?
What are the upper and lower tail numbers (95% confidence interval?)
Have you incorporated any regression into the overall ratings?
Could you create an overall skill rating for each OF arm? Prorate each player's rating up to a full season's worth of opportunities and regress in order to control the values for players with fewer opps?
Thanks for your comment...it only took me almost a month to get to it!
As for your questions about regression, our hierarchical model does perform a regression on the overall ratings. The overall values are pulled in towards the global mean , with players with smaller sample sizes being pulled more than players with large sample sizes.
The upper and lower tail numbers are a 95% posterior interval, which is essentially the same as a confidence interval except that we use a Bayesian approach instead of a classical statistics approach.
As for your first question, all of the OFs are displayed together, but the RF calculations are relative to only other RFs, since we break up the arm success/failure tabulations by outfield zone.
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