Email a copy of 'NL West Notes: D-Backs, Hudson, Giants, Gyorko' to a friend
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Email a copy of 'NL West Notes: D-Backs, Hudson, Giants, Gyorko' to a friend
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YourDaddy
Gyorko played 2B and SS in high school and college. I see no reason why he couldnt play shortstop until the end of the season and see if he can stick. Spangenberg and Gyorko in the lineup at the same time certainly makes the Padres a better team.
disgruntledreader 2
Reasons why he shouldn’t play shortstop until the end of the season include his lack of arm, his lack of range, and the fact that in barely 100 innings at the position, +/- says he’s already cost his team almost as much as the decidedly-mediocre Jimmy Rollins has in 10 times the innings.
YourDaddy
So you are using a stat that by definition needs 450 GAMES of data to be anywhere close to accurate to gauge how a player has done over 100 INNINGS? Ok. If you say so . From what I have seen he has committed no errors at short and has had no obvious bad plays.
disgruntledreader 2
On the statistical front, you should note that while all defensive stats take a while to stabilize because of variability of game-state and play distributions, +/- gets there faster than UZR. Three years is what you need to get to granularity between whether a guy is #2 or #3 at his position over time. Usable trends emerge (great, in the middle, awful) emerge much earlier than one season in.
On the observational front, if you’ve watched any significant portion of his innings at shortstop and find that he has had no obvious bad plays, you need to (a) get better at identifying bad plays and (b) understand what plays a typical shortstop makes which he’s been nowhere close to even having an attempt on.
Should we go out on a limb and assume you’re also part of the Padres fanbase who thinks Matt Kemp is something other than awful defensively?
Math&Baseball
The Padres knew Kemp wasn’t a defensive gold glover. But he wasn’t brought in for his defense, he was brought in for his bat. You know when the last time the padres had a 100 RBI player? Chase Headley in 2012. He’s got a wRC+ of 112 even playing majority of the games in Petco.
He’s got a .271/.318/.449 line with 21HRs and 94RBIs so far.
Despite Gyorko’s troubles the past few years he STILL managed to lead the Padres in RBIs in 2013 and 2014. He may not be defensively great, but if he’s found his bat he deserve to be in the lineup because he’s proven he has power at Petco.
disgruntledreader 2
wRC+ is context adjusted, so “even in Petco” makes no sense in that statement. (If anything, the park adjustments right now probably over-value offensive contributions in Petco a bit.)
And my point on Kemp was simply that there’s a subset of Padres fandom who genuinely seem to think that Matt Kemp adds value defensively – an opinion which takes a shocking lack of knowledge about baseball. I agree that Kemp’s offensive contributions have been of real value to the club, and think especially if they’re going to have Jankowski in CF next year, they can live with Kemp’s awful defense until the DH comes to the NL.
BlueSkyLA
Baseball is a game played by computers or people? Fill in your answer here: __________
feathers
No one is saying baseball is played by computers…unless they are talking about baseball computer games…but why not use analytics if they can help your team be better? A mixture of the eye test & analytics is possible and a good thing imo.
BlueSkyLA
The entire “anti-analytics” angle is being exaggerated, as a way of trying to divide baseball into old and new schools. Every team is using data in one way or another. They always have. The real question is how much to trust mathematical models to tell you everything you want to know about how real world systems work. This is an important issue in the use of statistical models in the sciences and is no less so in baseball. Understanding the limits of your data and math is key to making a model better. So the point here is we are being presented with a false choice.
BlueSkyLA
Yes and you may see my full answer if it gets through the arbitrary filter.
disgruntledreader 2
People do a better job of predicting human performance than computers do about _______ percent of the time.
BlueSkyLA
I was sure nobody would get the point and you proved it… mathematically!
BlueSkyLA
You are 100% right, obviously!