The Best Right Fielders of the Past 5 Years: Suzuki Dominates; Rios, Markakis Surprise

by Justin Bopp on Apr 7, 2011 5:09 PM EDT in Positional Reviews

Click to unlock today's theme: "forest surprise."

Complete Top 20 after the jump:

Note: Guerrro's and Abreu's defense, the still-surprising Drew ranking, and the bizarre peripherals of Guitierrez.

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What's surprising about the Drew ranking?

Lovely work as always.

Columnist at Beyond the Box Score

by Bill Petti on Apr 7, 2011 5:15 PM EDT reply actions

Oh, I think it would be a surprise to those

still angry about his early “not the best player of all time” performance like they expected.

Read: he’s been pretty damn good.

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by Justin Bopp on Apr 7, 2011 5:17 PM EDT up reply actions

Oh, the crazies, you mean?

Columnist at Beyond the Box Score

by Bill Petti on Apr 7, 2011 7:08 PM EDT up reply actions

Why is Markakis's positional adjustment so high?

by SeanP on Apr 7, 2011 5:23 PM EDT reply actions

Looks like playing time is a factor

Ichiro spent time in center, correct? And Werth and Rios both have fewer replacement runs, which indicates less playing time (and therefore less of a positional adjustment).

Count me as one of those not in any way surprised by the Drew ranking. What’s the difference between him and Markakis? Looks pretty even to me.

by Paul SF on Apr 7, 2011 5:58 PM EDT up reply actions

probably due to playing time at different positions

Ichiro and Rios are 2 that have played center field, so have a smaller positional adjustment. Zobrist has played all over the show. Swisher has played enough 1st base to appear on the 1st base WAR leaderboard at fangraphs.

It’s more of a “best players to have played some right field in the last 5 years” list than best right fielders. Maybe they Justin could look at trying to remove the positional adjustment from time at other postiions.

Or you could leave it out completely. Isn’t the positional adjustment for comparing players who played different positions? Surely it’s unneceessary to include it when comparing players who are, nominally at least, playing the same position?

by nsnz on Apr 7, 2011 6:05 PM EDT up reply actions

How do you give people credit for defense at superior position then?

If Ichiro plays CF, he won’t rack up UZR at the same rate as RF even if he plays the same defense. Positional adjustments attempt to correct for that.

by ThePanda on Apr 7, 2011 7:43 PM EDT up reply actions

Leaving it out probably isn't the best idea...

What I’m getting at, I think, is that time spent away from right field (or any position being looked at) shouldn’t count in determining the best right fielder.

Ideally positional adjustments would be irrelevant in comparisons like this as each player would have spent the vast majority of the time period at that position. In which case minor adjustments from playing a few games here and there at other positions wouldn’t be a problem. But some of these players have accumulated large amounts of RAR during periods when they weren’t seriously considered right fielders.

Should Swisher’s 231 games at 1st base count towards his standing as a right fielder? Or turn it round. Should Swisher be considered the 11th best first base over this period? He’s only played 231 games there, and only once – 2006 – has he spent more time at first than in the outfield.

Vlad’s spent only 20 games in the outfield over the last 2 years. Should the 33.2 RAR accumulated by him during that time count towards his right field total? Even with a positional adjustment?

The answer, IMO, would be to restrict the sample to only games played in right field. Or maybe only include seasons where a majority of games were played at right field. If you want to look at best, rather than most RAR, you could pro rate that to 162 games.

I just think the current data is a bit of a misrepresentation.

by nsnz on Apr 7, 2011 10:17 PM EDT up reply actions