Graph of the Day: The Yankees Outfield

by Dan Turkenkopf on Mar 30, 2009 7:00 AM EDT

Yankees_of_2008_medium

Trying something new here on GotD.

In the past week the Yankees have announced their starting outfield for 2009 - choosing Brett Gardner and Xavier Nady over Melky Cabrera and Nick Swish respectively.

Here's how the current starters stacked up defensively in 2008 by vector.

All vectors extend from the infield to the wall (more or less). I've shortened them for display purposes - so we can see the zones that are covered by more than one fielder.

Damon was amazing on balls hit in the normal LF positions (+7 outs) which suggests he's good at going forward and back on the ball, but doesn't necessarily have great lateral movement.

Nady, on the other hand, was -4 outs on balls hit to the normal RF position. I know it's beating a dead horse, but I'm still not sure why Nady is starting instead of Swisher. Sigh.

Data from David Pinto's Defensive Charts based on his Probabilistic Model of Range (PMR). You should definitely check them out.

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I'm a Mets fan

so really don’t care about the Highlanders, but this is pretty awesome.

by Sokojoe on Mar 30, 2009 10:00 AM EDT reply actions

Gardner

Looks impressive – is it just me, or will he cover a lot of the ground Damon won’t?

by Harry Pavlidis on Mar 30, 2009 10:06 AM EDT reply actions

Good grief Nady is awful.

How would Swisher look in place of Nady in RF?

by R.J. Anderson on Mar 30, 2009 11:44 AM EDT reply actions

Swisher's got a tiny sample size in RF for 2008

The zone with the most predicted outs has only 5.

Nady on the other hand had close to 40 in his biggest zone.

by Dan Turkenkopf on Mar 30, 2009 7:37 PM EDT up reply actions

That’s awesome.

The Basil Fawlty Moderating Strategy:
"We could run a nice blog here if we didn't have all these members getting in the way."

by WalrusMan on Mar 30, 2009 1:21 PM EDT reply actions

Nady's range graph really amuses me.

He’s awful with balls straight at him (maybe he can’t judge short/long very well?) He’s merely bad slightly to each side, then actually good two vectors away, but then back to bad at the extremes.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Mar 30, 2009 2:56 PM EDT reply actions