This week’s Sports Weekly piece by High Heat Stats was written by our own Adam Darowski. You can read it online here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2013/04/17/team-defense-plays-large-role-in-era/2091049/
As you can see from the URL, it’s about the role that team defense plays in a pitcher’s ERA.
My point is just you can’t hide a fielder as bad as Francoeur. He will be exposed, and your team will pay (a lot) for that exposure.
Thus, the whole is not the same as the sum of its parts. I’d much rather have competent fielders at every position and better than average ones at a few, than have a mix that arrives at the same total, but includes one or more awful fielders.
Is Francoeur really that bad? He had a bad year last season, but overall he’s +54 in Rfield for his career, including possibly the best arm in baseball (OK, basically all of those positive runs are from his arm, but that still makes him an average fielder without his hose.)
If you’re saying that Frency has hit the wall age-wise and is now too slow to be an average fielder out there, OK I get it. But I’d like to see one more year of data before I call him a bad outfielder.
Adam, great job, very concise.
Still early days, but so far, so good for Shields and Davis. In fact, the whole KC rotation has been pretty sharp, especially with control — 2nd-fewest walks and 2nd-best SO/BB among AL starters. Their rotation was 11th in SO/BB last season, and that was probably their best in many years.
I’ve always believed that if someone couldn’t explain something in a fairly brief, reasonably easy to understand fashion, there’s a good chance they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
This took maybe a couple of minutes to read and yet when I was done I had both learned something new and understood something far better than I had before.
Very well done Adam.
