I initially created Baseball Graphs to develop new and better ways of presenting baseball statistics. The 2003 season was my first full-season attempt, and it turned out pretty well. I now spend a lot of my time creating and formatting the baseball stats at The Hardball Times.
Along the way, I've also picked up the writing bug. I spend most of my energy writing for THT, but sometimes I like to write about more geeky stuff, baseball research and things like that. That's what this blog is for.
I'm very interested in graphics and other information display, so I'll probably post links to creative stuff like that. I also plan to write historical articles that complement the historical graphs. And I have inexplicably developed an interest in baseball win-related stats, such as Bill James's Win Shares and something called Win Probability Added. So you can expect a few posts about that stuff too.
If you're interested, I've created a complex spreadsheet full of WPA logic, which you can download at ftp.baseballgraphs.com/wpa. If you'd like to read more about Win Shares, try these links:
Win Shares Intro
Using DER to identify some of the greatest fielding teams in baseball history. With caveats.
While commenting on Chris Dial’s Baseball Primer article on Defense Efficiency Ratio, I came up with a new, half-baked idea. What if I looked at the data I ran for the baseball history graphs, and compared each team’s DER to the league DER at the time?
So I did. I call this stat DER+. It’s similar to OPS+ and ERA+, which are listed at Baseball Reference, but it doesn’t include an adjustment for park effect. I don’t have historical park factors for DER. This is very important, and it definitely undermines the validity of the stat.
Actually, this is really just a fun stat, anyway. As Chris says, DER is a nice baseline, but it?s very rough as a descriptive statistic and very few conclusions should be drawn from it. So let’s use DER+ to describe a few things in baseball history. And let’s be careful with our conclusions.
As a reminder, here is a graph of DER throughout baseball history.
DER has certainly gone through its ups and downs. Actually, I hadn’t realized that DER rose so dramatically from 1935 to 1941. The nature of the game fundamentally changed during that time, and it appears that this was primarily due to the introduction of the thonged web on the baseball glove. This is why its important to analyze team DER within historical context.
The 1939 New York Yankees recorded the highest DER+ in major league history. Their DER was .756 and the league average was .719, for a DER+ of 1.051. This is a relatively big number; the next highest DER+ belongs to the 1999 Cincinnati Reds, at 1.045.
We don’t have much detailed information about the 1939 Yankees. We do know, however, that they always had high DER’s relative to the league, as detailed in this Primer article by the Crank. If you scroll down to the comments in the article, you’ll find that KJOK (one of the key contributors to the Lahman database, which has just been released for 2003!) found that Yankee Stadium had an extreme impact on DER—as much as 15 points.
So, while the 1939 Yankees had some great fielders—particularly that outfield of Selkirk, DiMaggio and Keller—we should severely discount all their DER stats.
But we have a lot of detailed information about the 1999 Cincinnati Reds. For instance, we know that Riverfront Stadium was an average park in terms of impact on DER. We also have MGL’s Ultimate Zone Rating system, based on play-by-play data, including where each ball was hit and how hard it was hit.
MGL’s UZR says that Reds’ fielders saved 89 runs in 1999, which is the second-highest total of the past five years. In particular, Mike Cameron was phenomenal in center field (his only year as a Red) and Pokey Reese was otherworldly. Together, the two of them saved 60 runs over the season, compared to the league average. Add in Barry Larkin and Aaron Boone, and you’ve got a great fielding team. Maybe one of the best in major league history.
The 1999-2002 UZR data is available at this link.
I’ve posted DER Plus for all teams over 102% at the following sites:
American League DER Plus
National League DER Plus
If you sort these lists by year, and then by team, you will find the teams that achieved strong DER+ for several seasons in a row. If you subsequently correct for park effects, you’re likely to find some of the better fielding teams in history. Let’s not forget, however, that DER is very much a function of pitching, too. This is just for fun, not for Baseball Prospectus.
The teams of note are:
- The Chicago Cubs, from 1904 to 1910, were phenomenal. The best DER team of all time. During that time they played in West Side Grounds, which featured outfield dimensions of 340 feet in left, 316 feet in right and 560 feet in center (gulp). Sounds like a park effect.
However, their DER+ only dipped a bit when they moved to Wrigley in 1916. My copy of Total Baseball, which has park factors for all ballparks, also indicates that West Side Grounds were anti-home run, but not anti-DER. So Tinker to Evers to Chance actually may deserve a poem after all.
- The 1969 to 1979 Orioles (Brooks, Belanger, Blair), but watch out for park effects.
- The 1969/1970 Mets were known for their pitching, but their real strength lay in their DER/fielding (Tommie Agee=Mike Cameron). Park effect alert.
- The Indians of the late 1940’s (or was it the pitching?)
- The Trammell/Whitaker/Chet Lemon Tigers, whose only apperances on this list are concentrated in the early 1980’s, despite a favorable park environment.
- The Dodgers and Athletics also had serious park effects, similar to the Yankees. Very heavy grain of salt.
- And it must be said that today’s Anaheim Angels appear to be one of the best fielding teams of all time. They play in a relatively neutral park, yet they appear on the list three teams between 1999 and 2002 (2003 data was not calculated, by the way. Did I mention that Sean Lahman just posted the 2003 database?). And, according to UZR, their 2002 team was the best fielding team of the last five years.
So let’s end with a doff of the cap to the Angels, as well as the advanced fielding analysis being pursued by MGL, David Pinto, Mike Emeigh, Chris Dial, Michael Humphries, Charlie Saeger and others.
I should note that I too evaluated Pokey Reese as some sort of fielding god in 1999, using more traditional stats (ie, less accurate) than MGL. He was about 30 runs better than league, which is really, really good.
Bill James’s Park-S factor lets most of the air out of DER.
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