Graph of the Day: The 2008 Rangers Infield

by Dan Turkenkopf on Jun 15, 2009 8:00 AM EDT

Last week I showed you the outfield for the 2008 Texas Rangers. This week we take a look at the infielders for last year's team.

As always, I'm using David Pinto's defensive charts based on his Probabilistic Model of Range (PMR) and the image is courtesy of Google Earth.

Additional comments after the jump...

As you can see, there's a lot of overlap between fielders in the infield - largely due to infield flies. Although many fielding systems (UZR for example) choose to remove infield popups from the ratings, PMR keeps them.

This can affect the ratings for some of the players.

The popups are also the cause of what looks like tremendous range for the fielders. The SS range reaches from the stands down the third base line all the way to the first base zone.

It looks like moving Michael Young to 3B and bringing up Elvis Andrus has improved two positions substantially. Kinsler makes up for his poor defense with his offensive performance, but it does cut into his overall value.

Still, Jon Daniels and the Rangers staff identified a real opportunity to improve here and seem to have leapt at it.

Tweet Comment 5 comments | 0 recs |

Do you like this story?

Read More: graph of the day, gotd, Texas Rangers

Comments

Dan, how easy is it to do one combined ring of colors for the infield as a whole?

Is it just an issue of copy all the data for infielders and positions and aggregating with a pivot table or something?

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

by Sky Kalkman on Jun 15, 2009 8:15 AM EDT reply actions

Not quite that easy. These graphs are drawn by hand

But I don’t think it would take that long to do.

I’ll give it a try this afternoon.

by Dan Turkenkopf on Jun 15, 2009 8:18 AM EDT up reply actions

Here you go.. notice the difference in scale on this one

by Dan Turkenkopf on Jun 15, 2009 8:35 PM EDT up reply actions

What about using Retrosheet's grid?

I think that would provide a clearer picture of each fielder’s range if the data includes the infield flies.

Matt Mitchell

by mitchiapet on Jun 15, 2009 11:19 AM EDT reply actions

The data isn't available for retrosheet's grid, though. This data is from Dave Pinto's PMR which only takes into account "slice".

I agree that something done like this using UZR which uses rings in addition to slices would be sweet. Much smaller sample sizes per zone, though, and a smoothing effort would be needed. Or maybe not.

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

by Sky Kalkman on Jun 15, 2009 3:48 PM EDT up reply actions