Wednesday, February 04, 2004 |
Rethinking Eckstein: Is "Just Enough" Really Enough?
I linked to your analysis of the 2004 season, and was curious about some things. First off, isoSLG? Never heard of it. Care to explain?Jeff responded surprisingly quickly:
Also, I'm curious to get the roto-head spin on the effects of having David Eckstein behind a notorious groundball pitcher, Kelvim Escobar. It's been said that Eck is an inferior defender who positions himself shallow to make up for the fact that he can't make the throw to first from deep in the hole. Angel fans probably have no way of telling, because defensive outs have been heavily dependent on flyballs during his tenure with the team, and so most of the heavy lifting gets done in center or left. But his relatively small number of putouts at SS would tend to make me think that there might be something to this:
Defensive history for D Eckstein (SS, vs 100+ G) Season Team Pos PO Rank Pct 2003 ANA SS 193 16 of 23 0.696 2002 ANA SS 205 17 of 27 0.630 2001 ANA SS 178 16 of 23 0.696
Any ideas how I might go about answering this question?
isoSLG is simple: SLG - BA. Consider it a measure of raw power. For example, Scott Rolen put up a .528 SLG to Jason Giambi's .527, but Giambi hit 36 lower than Rolen's BA. You can infer that Giambi is a more powerful hitter than Rolen.Jeff, I thank you for the link and for the dialogue.You're probably well aware of the danger inherent in defensive metrics, but disclaimer aside, a few numbers I like to look at are RAA2 and Rate; here's a link to Eckstein's page:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/cards/eckstda01.shtml
RAA2 is a measure of how many runs better a player was defensively over a league-average player at his position, and Rate is a measure of how many runs better than league-average a guy is per 100 games played. If you look at these two, you see that Eckstein has progressed from a miserable defensive SS in 2001 to an excellent one last season. Another metric you could look at is Baseball Primer's UZR:
http://www.baseballprimer.com/articles/lichtman_2003-03-14_0.shtml
http://www.baseballprimer.com/articles/lichtman_2003-03-21_0.shtml
Those articles were written prior to the 2003 season, and show that David Eckstein was in the top third of all AL shortstops defensively (also that Derek Jeter sucks, which delights me to no end). Note that the second UZR article takes into consideration pitching staff tendencies, which answers your groundball/flyball inquiry.
Watching David Eckstein play shortstop is ... an experience. He gets to the balls he can and puts everything he has into his throws, yet his arm is still subpar. However, despite his flaws he's still a pretty good defensive shortstop, certainly not someone who's going to make a guy like Kelvim Escobar worse by missing a bunch of ground balls.
There is no single defensive statistic that can be considered "accurate"; a lot of it comes down to scouting and subjectivity. When a *bunch* of advanced, well-developed defensive metrics agree that a guy is a pretty good player, though, then you can infer that he's probably decent.
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