High & Inside: 11/10/10

by Justin Bopp on Nov 10, 2010 3:01 PM EST in Daily Box Score

Today's links:

Bill Baer pens a fine piece at BaseballAnalytics.org today, detailing how swiftly the collective saber-analysis of the Ryan Howard deal ("5/125? You've gotta be kidding me. Have you seen his splits?") was confirmed.
Dustin Parkes' article at theScore is a must-read for everyone. It will make you slightly uncomfortable with our current set of knowledge, and leave you wondering what the solution is. Here's The Truth About Prospecting.
Tango describes why hitLocation-based fielding metrics is better than not… to a point. Iluminative point:

So, that’s where we are: if you have one batted ball, you absolutely would prefer to know where the scorer thinks the ball went, than to know who actually recorded the out. If you had 100,000 balls in play, it’s the opposite.

The problem is that a season has four thousand balls in play. That leaves us open to uncertainty in both metrics. At some point, there’s a breakeven in which you would prefer to know more. My instincts tells me that somewhere around 3-5 years, a hitLocation-based metric tells you as much as a non hitLocation-based metric. That at 2 years or less, you much prefer the hitLocation metric (like UZR)and at 6+ years, you much prefer the non hitLocation metric (like WOWY).

JoePo, Nintendo being Nintendo, Mini-Semis, and Alien Zombies seeding life after the jump.

JoePo takes a different approach with the Jeterpocalypse. As always, a level head, a love of baseball, and being the best sportswriter alive -- as well as an attempt at a little clubhouse pyschology -- Joe offers a perspective we may not have considered:

*I was talking about how the Gold Glove voting works with an editor, and something struck me that I had not thought about before. You probably know that the Gold Gloves are voted for by managers and coaches. And really … this is the only award they’ve got. They don’t vote for the MVP, for Rookie of the Year, for Cy Young, for Manager of the Year, for the Hall of Fame, for almost anything. They vote for the Gold Gloves. That’s it.

And I think that, in many of their minds, the Gold Gloves probably take on a larger meaning. Sure, it’s about defense. But I wonder if for many it really is about rewarding those players who PLAY THE GAME RIGHT. The advanced stats always suggested that Ken Griffey Jr. was overrated defensively, but he won the Gold Glove every year in part, I think, because the way he played appealed to managers and coaches. There are a lot of guys like that. And if you look at the Gold Gloves that way — not as the best defensive players, exactly, but as the players who most appeal to managers and coaches for the way they play — it starts to make a whole lot more sense.

Ok, it all makes sense now. But rather than justify Gold Gloves, this explanation makes me want to rename it the "guys coach would let date his daughter, assuming she didn't look like a paler, longer-haired version of him" award.