Franklin Gutierrez Wins Games (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Advanced Defensive Statistics)

Win Probability, UZR, Batting Average on Specific Pitches or hit location, OPS, swinging strike rate. You may have heard some or all of those on baseball broadcasts lately. Given that such mentions aren't yet as commonplace as the triple crown stats or fielding, seeing or hearing such things is quite pleasant. Here's an example of that from the Seattle Mariners broadcast from last night (capture made by Jeff from the blog Lookout Landing in this post):


Too bad .png files aren't made of chocolate or else I'd eat it up.

Olney May Not Know Defense, But Somebody Does

Buster Olney may not understand a thing about defensive metrics, but luckily there are reporters who at least care enough to look into them. Geoff Baker recently wrote an article and a blog for the Seattle Times on the subject. He talked to everybody from Raul Ibanez(who was surprisingly informed about their short comings) to John Dewan and Mitchel Lichtman about the various fielding metrics available. If you don’t know a lot about defensive stats, Baker provides an excellent crash course for you to learn about them. And if you do know a lot about defensive statistics, it’s nice to see that this kind of article found its way into a newspaper.

These are the kind of reporters the baseball community needs more of. Geoff doesn’t know the most of any writer out there, nor is he a top notch analyst, but he gets as much information about a subject from as many diverse sources as he can and puts out a product that can be digested by the average fan. It’s writers like him that are going to bridge the gap between the VORPies and the majority of the baseball watching crowd. Enough effort put forth by those people and we may just start seeing stats like UZR creeping their way onto ESPN.