                         Evaluating Defense 

By Tom Tippett
Last updated March 29, 2000


We rate players based on performance, not reputation.

Our outfielder throwing rating, for example, measures the fielder's ability 
to prevent runners from taking extra bases and to throw them out when they 
try to advance. A fielder earns a good rating by positioning himself well, 
getting to the ball quickly, making a quick release, throwing with power, 
throwing with accuracy, and throwing to the right base. Someone with a 
powerful arm might still get a subpar rating if he doesn't get into 
throwing position quickly, throws wildly, or throws to the wrong base.

Similarly, our running rating is not just a measure of raw speed, but also 
the ability to read the ball off the bat, get a good jump, and make good 
decisions about when to go for the extra base.

And our rating for defensive range measures the ability to make plays. An 
infielder can earn a good rating through positioning, quickness, soft 
hands, and effective throwing (quick release, arm strength, accuracy). It's 
not always the flashiest player who makes the most of the balls that are 
hit his way.

Because our ratings measure the ability to succeed in a certain phase of 
the game, we evaluate performance by analyzing play-by-play data. This 
approach is not a radical one. Baseball people have been doing this for 
over a century to measure batting and pitching performances. They don't, 
after all, give the batting title to the guy with the prettiest swing, they 
give it to the player who hit for the highest average. They don't give the 
Cy Young to the pitcher with the best mechanics or the guy who throws the 
hardest, they give it to the one who considered to be the most effective. 
Using statistics to evaluate performance is part of the tradition of the 
game.

But this tradition extends only to hitting and pitching. You never hear a 
television or radio analyst talk about meaningful measures of baserunning, 
throwing or defense. Instead, they talk about their impressions of the 
player -- how fast he looks, his quickness, strength and athleticism. If 
they applied the same standard to hitters and pitchers, they'd never talk 
about slugging averages or walk-strikeout ratios.

Our approach is to apply the time-honored tradition of using well-crafted 
statistics to evaluate baseball performance. The difference is that we 
don't stop at hitting and pitching. We design ways to measure results in 
all phases of the game.

This approach can be controversial, because we sometimes find players whose 
performance is better or worse than you would guess by watching them a few 
times a year. And our ratings are occasionally at odds with the opinions 
expressed by some of baseball's most famous writers and TV personalities. 
But we sincerely believe that doing original research into player skills is 
an important part of producing an accurate baseball simulation.

Suppose a player has a reputation for great defense but our analysis 
doesn't show a superior performance. If we gave in to public opinion and 
rated him higher than his performance justified, we'd have these options:

- reduce the range rating of one of his teammates so the team's defense 
isn't overrated

- reduce the effectiveness of the team's pitchers to compensate for the 
extra plays this player will now make in the simulation

- disregard these side effects and allow the player, the team, and its 
pitchers to produce better results than they should 

We don't think it's fair to downgrade teammates so we can give a popular 
player a better rating than he deserves. And we don't think you'd want us 
to disregard the side effects and publish a season disk with players and 
teams who will overperform. So we do our best to rate players based on 
performance, even if that means we might occasionally take a little heat 
for a few of our ratings.


Judging by Watching
-------------------

For a couple of years now, I've wanted to write a little piece about how 
difficult it is to judge defensive ability, or any baseball skill for that 
matter, just by watching a lot of games. Then I found an essay by Bill 
James in his 1977 Baseball Abstract (a self-published book that predated 
his debut in bookstores by about five years) that says what I wanted to say 
far, far better than I ever could.

Here are a few excerpts from this wonderful essay, starting with a comment 
on how differently most people tend to approach the assessment of hitters 
and fielders:

"While we might not all be able to agree who the greatest-hitting first 
baseman ever was, the record books will provide us with a reasonably brief 
list to choose from: Gehrig, Anson, Foxx, Sisler. That's about it. Nobody's 
going to argue that it was Joe Judge or Moose Skowron, because the record 
books simply will not permit it . . . 
 
Fielding statistics provide no such limited clarity. Talk about the 
greatest fielding shortstops ever . . . and the basic argument for 
everybody is 'One time he made a play where...' 
 
Suppose we turn that same argument back to hitting. Now Moose Skowron hit 
some baseballs a long way, but nobody is going to say that he was the 
greatest hitting first baseman ever because 'One time I saw him hit a 
baseball so far that..." It is understood, about hitters, that the 
important question is not how spectacularly but how often. Brooks Robinson 
is known as a great fielding third baseman not because of the number of 
plays that he makes, but because he looks so good making them. Nobody talks 
anymore about what a great hitter Jim Northrup was, although to tell you 
the truth I never saw anybody who looked better at the plate. It is 
understood that, notwithstanding appearances, he wasn't an especially good 
hitter. Hitters are judged on results; fielders, on form."

And he talks about the difficulty of trying to judge effectiveness simply 
by watching:

"One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 
hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It 
might be that a reporter, seeing every game the team plays, could sense the 
difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt 
it . . . the difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is 
simply not visible."

"a fielder's visible fielding range, which is his ability to move to the 
ball after it is hit, is vastly less important than his invisible fielding 
range, which is a matter of adjusting his position a step or two before the 
ball is hit."

In that essay, Bill went on to propose a scoring system that accomplishes 
essentially what STATS Inc. is doing now -- recording the location of every 
batted ball so that we could build a record of fielding performances 
similar to the statistical records that we use to judge batting and 
pitching performances.


Measuring Defensive Range
-------------------------

Defensive range is one of the hardest elements of performance to measure, 
but we have made some good progress in recent years.

Official fielding stats provide information such as games played, putouts, 
assists, errors, double plays, and fielding percentage. But using these 
numbers to assess player skills is extremely difficult, if not impossible. 
The list of reasons is very long, but they all boil down to two things:

- they don't tell you how many chances to make plays were presented to each 
fielder

- they don't tell you whether those chances were routine, normal, or 
challenging 

For these reasons, it's very difficult to measure fielding ability using 
stats such as assists per game, putouts per game, total chances per game, 
or fielding percentage. It's sometimes possible to pick out the very best 
and very worst fielders using these numbers, but it's very hard to evaluate 
the majority of players. 

In 1999, for example, Troy O'Leary led the majors in putouts by a left 
fielder. Is this because:

- he played more innings than everyone else?

- he played behind a pitching staff that doesn't strike out a lot of 
batters, so more balls were put in play?

- his pitching staff induced a high percentage of fly balls?
his pitching staff had a lot of lefties, who therefore faced more than the 
normal number of right-handed batters who hit more balls to left?

- it just happened that more balls were hit to left when he was playing?
he was lucky to get an unusually high number of routine plays?

- he's the best left fielder in baseball? 

Baseball analysts, ourselves included, have made many attempts to devise 
methods that deal with some of these other factors so that we can isolate 
the contribution the player is making. Let's review them, and then talk 
about some newer methods that we've been using for the past few years.


Range Factors and Defensive Innings
-----------------------------------

In the 1970s, Bill James introduced the idea of range factors to compensate 
for playing time. A player's range factor is generally computed as 
successful chances (putouts plus assists) per game. This was a good first 
step, even though Bill acknowledged at the time that it wasn't meaningful 
for pitchers, catchers and first basemen.

One thing that frustrated Bill was the fact that not all games played are 
equal. Some players play almost every inning of their games. Others split 
the playing time with a platoon partner. Late-inning defensive specialists 
often pick up a lot of games played without actually playing a lot. For a 
while, Bill devised methods to estimate how many innings each fielder was 
actually in the game at his position, but this is very hard to do. 

Fortunately, companies like STATS Inc. have been publishing accurate counts 
of defensive innings for the last ten years. So we can now compute range 
factors on a per-nine-innings basis, just like we do for earned run 
averages.

Using a range factor based on defensive innings, Brian Hunter moves to the 
top of the list of 1999 left fielders with 2.41 putouts per nine innings. 
O'Leary drops to seventeenth. So can we now annoint Hunter as the best left 
fielder in baseball? Not yet.

We still don't know how many chances he had to make plays. What if his 
pitching staff generated more fly balls and line drives to the outfield 
than others did? Without knowing more about the number, type and location 
of balls put in play, it's hard to learn anything meaningful from a simple 
ranking based on putouts per nine innings.


Adjusted Range Factors
----------------------

Even if we use defensive innings to measure playing time, we still haven't 
taken into account (a) the number of opportunities presented to each 
fielder and (b) the fact that some putouts and assists are harder to come 
by than others. So, about a dozen years ago, I developed a new type of 
range factor that adjusts for many of these variables in the following 
ways:

- it counts the number balls put in play while each fielder was at his 
position, removing the strikeout rate of the pitching staff from the 
equation

- it counts only those putouts and assists that actually made the fielder 
do some important work (e.g. taking a groundball and getting an out by 
making a throw or stepping on the bag for a force, spearing a line drive, 
or tracking down a fly ball) and ignores the ones that don't say much of 
anything about defensive range (e.g. taking a throw at first base, making 
the pivot on a double play, or tagging a runner on a steal attempt)

- it tracks balls put in play by left- and right-handed batters separately, 
since players pull the ball more often than they go the other way

- it adjusts for the ground ball percentage of each team's pitching staff 

This approach produces much better information than does an ordinary range 
factor, and has the advantage of being useful even when we're using play-
by-play data that doesn't contain detailed hit location data. But we're 
still left with the fact that we're using these adjustments to make an 
educated guess at how many opportunities each fielder had to make plays. It 
goes without saying that it's possible to do better when we have access to 
play-by-play data that records the location of every batted ball.


Fielding Runs
-------------

Before moving on, let me take a moment to say that the Fielding Runs 
numbers in the Total Baseball encyclopedia can be extremely misleading. I 
don't enjoy saying this, because they were developed by Pete Palmer, and 
Pete's a friend and one of the nicest guys I've ever met.

The first problem I have with fielding runs is that they're just a 
glorified range factor, with different weights for different events. So, 
like range factors, you cannot interpret them accurately unless you know 
the strikeout rate and groundball/flyball ratio of the pitching staff and 
what percentage of left-handed batters the fielder faced. For a good 
example of the distortions that often creep into the fielding runs numbers, 
see the comments on Frank White and Ryne Sandberg in an article I wrote for 
ESPN.com in September, 1998 (www.diamond-mind.com/articles/espn9809.htm).

I don't agree with some of the formulas, mainly because they put too much 
weight on some events. For example, the formula for outfielders is .20(PO + 
4A - E + 2DP), meaning that catching a fly ball with the bases empty earns 
you .20 fielding runs, while catching the same fly ball and throwing out a 
runner for a double play earns you 1.4 fielding runs. In both cases, the 
fielder made the best play available, but one counts for seven times as 
much as the other. And suppose one center fielder reaches a ball but muffs 
it for a one-base error, while another lets it go up the gap for a double.  
The guy who reached the ball has .20 fielding runs deducted and the second 
guy isn't penalized at all.

The fielding runs formula mixes range, errors and throwing into one number, 
which is appropriate for what Total Baseball is trying to accomplish (an 
overall player rating), but useless for someone like me who's trying to 
come up with separate ratings for these aspects of a fielder's play.


Zone Ratings
------------

The next logical step beyond range factors is a system that counts actual 
opportunities to make plays. We weren't able to do that until 1989, because 
nobody tracked the location of every batted ball until then. The folks at 
STATS, Inc. were the first to do it, and they were quick to develop the 
zone rating to take advantage of this new information.

The zone rating should have been a tremendous breakthrough, but STATS made 
some serious errors in designing this statistic. STATS says the "zone 
rating measures all the balls hit in the area where a fielder can 
reasonably be expected to record an out, then counts the percentage of outs 
actually made." This is a step in the right direction. Instead of having to 
estimate the number of opportunities to make plays from defensive innings, 
percentages of balls in play, the left-right composition of the pitching 
staff, and the staff groundball/flyball ratio, we can actually count the 
balls hit to each fielder while they are in the game.

The first problem is that they don't count all the balls. For example, no 
infielder is charged with an opportunity when a grounder is hit down the 
lines, in the holes, or up the middle. The only plays that go into the zone 
ratings are the ones where the ball is hit more or less at a fielder. The 
ones that are left out are the ones that only the best fielders get to. The 
net result is a system that places a lot more emphasis on good hands than 
range.

The second problem occurs when an infielder starts a double play. STATS 
credits him with two outs and one opportunity. Manny Alexander, for 
example, has a 1.017 zone rating for 1999, meaning that he created an out 
more than 100% of the time. While I agree that starting double plays is an 
important skill for an infielder, this approach gives a significant boost 
to infielders who play behind pitchers who put lots of runners on base 
and/or with a pivot partner who turns the DP well, and it clouds the effort 
to measure defensive range.

The third problem is that errors are mixed in with the ability to get to 
the ball in the first place. For example, in 1999, Edgardo Alfonzo had a 
zone rating of .921, while the norm for his position was .905. At face 
value, you'd think this means that he covered more ground than the average 
second baseman. But he also made 8 fewer errors than the average second 
baseman, given the number of chances he handled. If you change 8 of his 
outs into errors, his zone rating drops to .902. Now he looks like a 
fielder with average range and very good hands.

Once again, let me say that the idea behind the STATS zone rating is sound. 
Done properly, it would be an improvement over the adjusted range factors I 
talked about. But these problems are enough to remove much of its value for 
evaluating defensive range.

NOTE:  In the STATS 2000 Baseball Scoreboard book, STATS announced that 
they have changed their zone rating calculation to credit an infielder with 
one out and one opportunity when he starts a double play. We applaud them 
for making this change. Keep in mind, however, that all of the zone ratings 
they have published to date (through the 1999 season) use the old two-outs-
one-opportunity formula.


Defensive Average
-----------------

For a few years, we used a type of zone rating called Defensive Average 
(DA) . It was developed by Pete DeCoursey and Sherri Nichols and used play-
by-play data from The Baseball Workshop. Like the STATS zone rating, 
defensive average uses the same principle of counting batted balls hit into 
each fielder's zone and counting the number of plays he made. But it covers 
the whole field and doesn't mix apples and oranges by double-counting 
double plays.

We felt we got better results from defensive average than from the STATS 
zone ratings. But DA isn't perfect either. One of the perplexing problems 
in any system is how to assign responsibility for balls hit between 
fielders. In both the STATS and DA systems, the player making the play gets 
one opportunity and one play. But things get tricky when the ball falls in 
for a hit.

In DA, each player gets charged with half an opportunity when the play 
results in a hit. That means that someone playing next to a weak fielder 
tends to look worse than he is, because if the other guy makes the play, 
there is no opportunity charged, but if the ball falls in, it costs him a 
half of one. In past years, when we put together our player ratings, we 
were aware of this limitation and did our best to make intelligent 
adjustments to compensate for it. But we always wanted to see if we could 
do better.


The Diamond Mind System
-----------------------

In 1996, we came up with a new approach to computing zone ratings that does 
a better job in three areas -- it counts more batted balls, it handles the 
plays between fielders better, and it takes into account the difficulty of 
the play.

Other systems, like the STATS zone rating and DA, ignore certain types of 
batted balls. Bunts are excluded from both systems, so we get less help in 
trying to evaluate catchers, pitchers, third basemen and first basemen. 
Popups are excluded from both systems, in the belief that all popups are 
routine and don't therefore measure range. But some popups, like the not-
so-high ones that an infielder must go back on, are plays that only the 
best fielders will make.

The system we've developed counts all batted balls except popups on the 
infield, which we omitted for two reasons. The first is that over 99% of 
these plays result in an out, so they don't help us distinguish the good 
fielders from the not-so-good. Second, because these plays are easy to 
make, most popups can be handled by any of several fielders. We noticed, 
for example, that the best defensive first basemen tend to take all the 
popups in their area, making their second-basemen look less effective, 
while the weaker fielders would leave many of these plays to the second 
baseman.

Our new system handles plays between fielders better because it calculates 
the percentage of those plays that are made by the average fielder at each 
position. Instead of arbitrarily assigning half an opportunity to each 
fielder, it assigns responsibility more fairly. If a line drive between 
short and third is handled 20% of the time by the third baseman, 25% of the 
time by the shortstop, and is a hit the rest of the time, these are the 
percentages we use to assign responsibility. Each player gets credit for 
the number of plays made compared to the league average for his position 
given the mix of batted balls he faced.

This approach also takes into account the difficulty of the play. Other 
systems charge the player with one opportunity for every ball hit into the 
zone, regardless of type (grounder versus line drive) or location (at the 
fielder or in the gap), so a player can be made to look bad if he faces a 
higher-than-normal percentage of tough plays. Our system evaluates each 
type of batted ball and each zone separately, thereby giving a fielder more 
credit for making a more difficult play and penalizing him less if he fails 
to make that difficult play. This way, if a fielder happens to face a 
tougher array of chances, he can still look good.

NOTE:  On pages 170-172 of the STATS 2000 Baseball Scoreboard book, STATS 
introduced a new measure that is essentially identical to the system we 
have been using since 1996. What we've been calling 'plays made above or 
below the league average', they call the Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR).  Even 
though STATS didn't give us proper credit for coming up with this 
technique, I am very happy to see them add this type of analysis to their 
toolkit, since it will help all baseball fans get access to better 
information about defensive performance.

Before I move on to talk about some of the results of using this new 
system, let me take a moment to discuss some remaining challenges in the 
seemingly never-ending pursuit of a better fielding metric.


Park Effects
------------

In Coors Field, it's harder for outfielders to make plays because the ball 
doesn't stay in the air as long at that altitude. It's hard, especially for 
visiting outfielders, to pick up the ball against the Metrodome roof, so 
there are quite a few cheap doubles and triples in that stadium each year. 
Some balls that can be caught in Tiger Stadium hit high on the wall in 
Fenway. Some infields, such as Mile High Stadium in 1993-94 are so choppy 
that a lot more errors are made there. This, in my opinion, is where the 
next innovation in fielding ratings needs to be made.

To help us get a grip on these effects, our fielding analysis software 
creates a detailed report of home-road fielding performance. We use this 
report to quantify the effect on the percentages of outs made on different 
types of batted balls in various ballparks. With this information, we can 
make appropriate adjustments for the outfielders who play in Coors Field 
and other unusual parks, and this helps us come up with more accurate 
player ratings.


Pitcher Quality
---------------

Regrettably, we may never be able to separate completely the contributions 
of the pitcher and the fielder. If a ball drops in, is it because the 
pitching was bad or because the fielder failed to make the play?

Our system helps a little here. If a bad pitching staff showers its defense 
with lots of line drives, that's ok. Our system measures fielders on how 
often they field those line drives and doesn't penalize them for facing 
more than the average number of line drives.

But I still think good pitching makes fielders look good (just as good 
fielders makes pitchers look good), so we keep the quality of the pitching 
staff in mind as we assign our ratings.


A Brief Recap
-------------

These are the points I've tried to make in this review of fielding 
statistics and approaches to evaluating them:

- range factors are accurate in some cases, but you have to be really, 
really careful in how you evaluate them. Simple rankings, such as the ones 
in the STATS books, can be highly misleading. Adjusted range factors are 
better, but still imperfect. The Total Baseball fielding runs numbers are 
worse.

- the STATS zone ratings for infielders are accurate in some cases, but 
quite biased in others. The defensive average figures are better, because 
they're based on the same ideas but lack the flaws of the STATS system. (By 
the way, defensive average figures are no longer being published.)

- we think our system is better than the STATS zone ratings and DA, but 
we're not saying it's perfect, and frankly, it may never be perfect. But 
it's much better than relying on the media to tell us who can play. 


Converting Analysis into Player Ratings
---------------------------------------

I'm sure you've gathered by now that our approach to rating players is to 
look at the evidence as carefully as we can.

Our analysis software computes our own version of a zone rating for each 
player, but more importantly, it also determines how each fielder's 
performance compared to the league average on each type and location of 
batted ball. That type of analysis tells us, for example, that a certain 
third baseman did well on balls hit down the line but was below average on 
bunts and other softly hit balls. We then add up his ratings for each type 
of batted ball and give him an overall number that represents the number of 
plays he made above or below the league average given the mix of 
opportunities presented to him.

Andruw Jones, for example, led the majors by making 51 more plays than the 
average center fielder in 1999. In any given season, the major league 
leader tends to make 30-50 more plays than the average fielder at his 
position, given the number and type of opportunities presented to him, 
though this varies from year to year.

But this "net plays versus the league" analysis isn't enough, by itself, 
because it doesn't tell us whether he has been affected by his home park 
and the other fielders he plays with. So we analyze the fielding data on a 
home/road basis and factor that into our thinking. And we use reports of 
team defense to clarify the relationship between neighboring fielders.

Our team fielding reports show how a pair of fielders did as a tandem 
relative to the league average, and that helps us make sure the individual 
player ratings combine to form an accurate reflection of the team's 
defense. With these reports, we can look at the zones between fielders and 
get a very good picture of what happened there. We can see, for example, 
that in 1999 Scott Brosius was way above average on balls to his left, 
and that cut down on the number of plays Derek Jeter could make in that 
zone, but since the overall team defense in that zone was very good, 
there's no reason to penalize Jeter for it. And we can see that Lee Stevens 
of Texas was well below average on balls hit to his right, and while Mark 
McLemore turned a bunch of them into outs, quite a few went through for 
hits as well, meaning that Stevens was hurting the team by failing to reach 
more of these balls.

Another of our analysis programs counts the number of times a player is 
used as a defensive sub or is removed for a defensive sub. This information 
doesn't tell us anything about performance, of course, but it is very 
helpful to know that one fielder was regarded by his manager as being 
superior to another.

Like many of you, we read a lot and we watch games and highlight shows on 
Fox and ESPN and DirecTV, because it helps to have an image of a player 
when we evaluate the performance data. And we compile an extensive database 
of player notes, because it's helpful to know who's coming off a knee 
injury or a shoulder problem that might have affected their ability to make 
plays.

And when the evidence doesn't match the player's reputation, we double-
check our work and look very, very hard for the reasons why. Whenever 
possible, we talk to people who really know baseball -- local writers, 
broadcasters and sophisticated fans -- and who have seen the player quite a 
bit, to see if we can gain some additional insight into each player's 
performance.


Other Approaches to Rating Players
----------------------------------

I want to take a moment to talk about other sources of information that we 
could use to rate fielders if we didn't want to go to all the trouble of 
developing software, licensing play-by-play data, and spending weeks poring 
over the analysis.

We could rely on the opinions of sportswriters and members of the broadcast 
media, but this is problematic for several reasons:

- when they say "he's the best second baseman in baseball," it's not always 
clear what they mean. They could mean he's the best overall player at his 
position (including hitting, running, etc.). They could mean he has great 
hands. They could mean he turns the double play well or that he has great 
range. Even if they mean all of these things to some degree, an overall 
evaluation doesn't help us. We have separate ratings for separate skills, 
and we need objective evaluations of each skill.

- they don't talk about all the players. We have 1200+ players to rate each 
year, and only a fraction of them are frequently discussed in the media

- they may be biased toward the teams they cover, the players who play for 
teams in media-intensive cities, or the teams that got a lot of exposure in 
the playoffs

- they don't see many of the players, so their opinions can be second- or 
third-hand

- and they may be slow to pick up on a change in performance. We've been 
rating players for more than twelve years, and it often seems as if the 
media is a year or 18 months behind. For example, in the 1980s, we 
routinely gave Eric Davis an Excellent rating in center but dropped it to 
Average after the analysis showed that he'd been slowed by knee injuries. 
Two years later, the media started to say the same thing, and he was moved 
to left field not long after that. We started giving Barry Larkin an 
Excellent rating two years before the media figured out that there were 
other shortstops besides Ozzie Smith. 

We could rely on the opinions we hear from other players, managers, and 
team executives, but they don't see all the players either, and their 
remarks can be influenced by the needs of the team. It's to their advantage 
to talk about players in certain ways, whether it's to hype someone for 
marketing purposes, or to talk them down in a salary squabble. We need 
information that is less prone to bias.

We could use the opinions of professional baseball scouts. This is better 
than using the media because scouts are trained to see things that other 
people don't see. But it's difficult to find a collection of scouts who 
have seen every player and can make their evaluations available to people 
outside the organizations they work for. And, of course, scouting is not an 
exact science either.

We could base our judgments on how often someone shows up on SportsCenter. 
But the photogenic play isn't always the best play. The exact same fly ball 
might produce a routine play for a great fielder, a diving catch for the 
average fielder, or a single for the poor fielder. The diving catch is the 
only one that makes the highlight films. The majority of highlight-film 
plays are made at the edge of the fielder's effective range, whatever that 
range happens to be.

Here's a good example. A few years ago, I saw a game in Baltimore in which 
the right fielder broke back on a line drive, realized it wasn't hit that 
hard, reversed course and recovered in time to make a nice shoestring 
catch. What should have been a very easy play wound up being shown dozens 
of times as CNN's Play of the Day.

We could give a lot of consideration to Gold Glove awards. But we can't 
award a player an Excellent range rating just because he won the Gold 
Glove. Why not? First, the Gold Glove is given for overall fielding 
performance, including range, throwing, and avoiding errors. Our fielders 
have separate ratings for these three factors. It should not be surprising 
that a fielder may occasionally win a Gold Glove by virtue of excellence in 
throwing and avoiding errors, while having only average or above-average 
range. Second, the voters do not have access to the information we compile 
in our fielding studies, and they make mistakes. Third, I'm not convinced 
that the voters put all that much effort into the process.
