There’s no denying defensive metrics are controversial. Whether they clash with what you’ve seen with your own eyes, or you just don’t believe them, it seems like everyone has some sort of opinion to offer on their validity.

On FanGraphs, we carry no less than four different defensive metrics:

UZR – Mitchel Lichtman’s Ultimate Zone Rating
DRS – John Dewan’s Defensive Runs Saved
TZL – Rally’s Total Zone (location based version)
TZ – Rally’s Total Zone (standard version)

There’s no denying that we use some more frequently than others (cough, UZR), but the reason we have all four is because it’s great to see what different data sets and different models spit out. And In addition to the four, there’s also a fifth completely unrelated metric in the Fans Scouts Report that is run each and every year on insidethebook.com by Tangotiger.

It’s important to note that all these defensive metrics are not on the same scale, so it’s difficult to glance at all four (five if you use the Fans Scouting Report) and get a good sense if they’re in agreement or not. Which brings me to the preliminary look at the Aggregate Defensive Evaluations, where each metric is put on the same scale for each position, averaged, and then a standard deviation is computed for each player. Here are the 2009 Shortstops (min 82 games played):

As you can see, Paul Janish and Brendan Ryan are the clear leaders atop the list and even all the metrics are for the most part in agreement. +/- 5 runs in either direction is still going to make them elite defenders.

And there are players like Yunel Escobar who is considered by Total Zone and DRS to be very good, but by UZR and the Fans to be more or less average. On an aggregate level he still ends up as very good, though there is a good amount of disagreement as to just how good he is, even if no system thinks he’s below average.

All in all, it should be easy to go up and down the list and see which players there’s a high level of confidence about defensively, and which there is not.

From a mere computational standpoint, is this the best way to go about combining defensive metrics? I’m really not sure and it’s certainly worth looking into further. There are a lot of options in weighting the metrics differently and how to scale them, but overall I feel this is at least a decent start and something I hope to delve into a bit more.

The point here is that there’s a lot of information in these metrics with so many models out there it’s becoming increasingly important to try and identify what we’re fairly confident about and what we’re not so confident about instead of making the mistake of throwing them all away.

Good news everyone!

Minor league stats are updated for 2010 and will continue to be updated throughout whatever’s left of the season. We also have added the 2010 Mexican League, Venezuelan Summer League, and Dominican Summer League and plan to have the the winter leagues as well.

There’s still a little bit of cleanup that needs to be done in terms of player matching (Strasburg for instance has 2 pages still), but that should be completed this weekend.

Just 1 day until the event! Tickets will be available online up until 8am tomorrow morning as long as they’re not sold out.

Location: Florence Gould Hall (55 East 59th Street)

Tickets: $15 online (+$1.36 surcharge). $20 cash only at the door.

NY Baseball (9:00am – 9:40am)

Joe Pawlikowski, Mike Axisa, Benjamin Kabak (All RiverAveBlues.com), Matthew Cerrone (MetsBlog.com), and Mark Simon (ESPN) will be discussing all things baseball in NY. Moderated by Carson Cistulli.

Baseball Media (9:45am – 10:30am)

Jonah Keri (Bloomberg Sports) will host a panel comprised of Will Leitch (Deadspin, New York Magazine), Michael Silverman (Boston Herald), Matthew Cerrone (MetsBlog.com), Alex Speier (WEEI.com), and David Biderman (WSJ) to discuss how baseball media coverage has changed in recent years and will continue to evolve.

Baseball Stats (10:40am – 11:15am)

Jon Sciambi (ESPN), Mitchel Lichtman, Sky Kalkman (Beyond the Boxscore), Dave Cameron, and David Appelman will discuss where advanced baseball stats are right now and where they’ll be headed. Moderated by Carson Cistulli.

Bloomberg Sports Presentation (11:20 – 11:35)

Bloomberg Sports will make a presentation of a brand new product.

FanGraphs Q&A (11:40 – End)

Dave Cameron, Carson Cistulli, Bryan Smith, Joe Pawlikowski, Mike Axisa, and David Appelman will take questions until we’re officially kicked out (a little after 12:00).

Afterparty (3:30pm – Game Over)

Additionally, we’re going to host a game-watching party for attendees to gather at a local watering hole and view that afternoon’s Boston-New York match-up together. Those who make it to the event will be invited to join us for several more hours of fun later in the afternoon. Details and directions will be given at the event.

For those of you who are still making up your minds about whether or not to come to the very first FanGraphs live event in NYC this Saturday, August 7th at 9am, here are the full details:

Location: Florence Gould Hall (55 East 59th Street)

Tickets: $15 online (+$1.36 surcharge). $20 cash only at the door.

NY Baseball (9:00am – 9:40am)

Joe Pawlikowski, Mike Axisa, Benjamin Kabak (All RiverAveBlues.com), Matthew Cerrone (MetsBlog.com), and Mark Simon (ESPN) will be discussing all things baseball in NY. Moderated by Carson Cistulli.

Baseball Media (9:45am – 10:30am)

Jonah Keri (Bloomberg Sports) will host a panel comprised of Will Leitch (Deadspin, New York Magazine), Michael Silverman (Boston Herald), Matthew Cerrone (MetsBlog.com), Alex Speier (WEEI.com), and David Biderman (WSJ) to discuss how baseball media coverage has changed in recent years and will continue to evolve.

Baseball Stats (10:40am – 11:15am)

Jon Sciambi (ESPN), Mitchel Lichtman, Sky Kalkman (Beyond the Boxscore), Dave Cameron, and David Appelman will discuss where advanced baseball stats are right now and where they’ll be headed. Moderated by Carson Cistulli.

Bloomberg Sports Presentation (11:20 – 11:35)

Bloomberg Sports will make a presentation of a brand new product.

FanGraphs Q&A (11:40 – End)

Dave Cameron, Carson Cistulli, Bryan Smith, Joe Pawlikowski, Mike Axisa, and David Appelman will take questions until we’re officially kicked out (a little after 12:00).

Afterparty (3:30pm – Game Over)

Additionally, we’re going to host a game-watching party for attendees to gather at a local watering hole and view that afternoon’s Boston-New York match-up together. Those who make it to the event will be invited to join us for several more hours of fun later in the afternoon. Details and directions will be given at the event.

I found Tangotiger’s most recent post on what if every player in the majors leagues was exactly the same as something anyone who has the slightest interest in baseball analysis should read.

Suppose that God herself came to you and told you that she was going to do something devious: for the 2011 baseball season, every team would have 25 players of identical talent, with all 30 teams being equals.

If you tuned out for the weekend and missed any of our coverage of the trade deadline on Friday or Saturday, here’s links to our analysis of what went down:

Marlins Acquire Ohman From O’s For VandenHurk

Royals Trade Away Ankiel, Farnsworth

The Giants Add Pen Arms

New York Yankees Acquire Kerry Wood

Dotel to the Dodgers

Ted Lilly and Ryan Theriot to the Dodgers

Cardinals Add Jake Westbrook, Lose Ryan Ludwick

Pirates Lift Chris Snyder

The Ryan Ludwick Trade: San Diego’s Perspective

New York Yankees Acquire Austin Kearns

Rays Acquire Chad Qualls

The Lance Berkman Trade: Yankees Perspective

Cristian Guzman to the Rangers

The Edwin Jackson Trade: Arizona’s Perspective

The Edwin Jackson Trade: Chicago’s Perspective

The Miguel Tejada Trade

New Prospects for Nats, Jays, O’s

Baseball Info Solutions has just released a more comprehensive FAQ on their fielding system, which we list on FanGraphs as DRS (and the various components that make up DRS).

It goes into details about how they make adjustments for various positions, ball hogging, home runs saved, the Green Monster, player positioning, etc….

Click to read the FAQ

It’s rare I get to write about my two favorite things in tandem. Baseball and Food.

Today, as Top Chef runner-up Bryan Voltaggio offered his unique twist on ballpark food at a Frederick Key’s game, I made the two-hour drive in traffic from Arlington Virginia up to Frederick Maryland to check out his creations.

I got to Harry Grove Stadium at 6:00pm sharp – the time the gates opened – and was greeted by a mostly full parking lot and a line of people that started at the gate and made its way well into the parking lot. Apparently I was not the only one eager to see what chef Voltaggio had in store.

Inside the ballpark, the chef had taken over one of the standard concession stands and turned it into a “Volt” concession stand for the night. He was orchestrating the whole thing in person, and throughout the ballpark his family and friends could be seen wearing Fredrick Key’s shirts with Volt 21 printed on the back. The number “21” represents the 21 course tasting menu offered at his restaurant Volt in Fredrick, for which there is nearly a full year’s wait to make a reservation.

Once in line, Volt’s staff took your order before you made it to the counter to speed things up and keep the line moving. After originally ordering one of everything so I could write up a thorough report, I soon realized that there was no way on earth I could eat or carry all that food – 16 items! I ended up pairing down considerably to just five smaller items.

I apologized for changing my order so drastically, paid and received my food. I carefully balanced all my food and went off to a nearby corner of the ballpark to start tasting.

For me the highlight was the Gazpacho “Dipping Dots” Rock Shrimp Ceviche. These really were just like Dippin’ Dots, but instead of chocolate and vanilla, it was small frozen spheres of heirloom tomatoes. Quite refreshing on a hot day and an interesting twist on something I do not usually get at the ballpark. Am I alone in failing to understand how Dippin’ Dots still exist?

The other dishes I tried were the Coriander Crusted Yellow Fin Tuna (not my favorite), a Soft Shell Crab Sandwich with Pickled Fennel-Cucumber Slaw (pretty good) and a Chocolate Covered Banana which was a great way to finish things off. I also snagged some Summer Truffle Pop Corn to eat while watching the game.

I had meant to try the Lamb Hot Dogs but in my haste to change my order, I forgot, and I had no plans on waiting in a line wrapped around the entire stadium. However, the people I talked to seemed to enjoy them.

Overall it was a lot of fun and a seemingly huge success for the Frederick Keys and chef Voltaggio. On average the Keys said they have an attendance of about 4,500 and with chef Voltaggio they managed to draw a crowd of 7,135.

WHAG-TV reports that Bryan’s business partner says “there will be another ‘Volt night’ sometime in the near future.”

A couple weeks ago Sean Smith released a revamped Total Zone system which included Gameday location data. You can read all about it on baseballprojection.com.

On FanGraphs you can now find the new Total Zone numbers for the 2005-2009 season in the player pages under the heading TZL in the Advanced Fielding sections. Here’s what Carl Crawford’s numbers look like:

In light of yesterday’s article on Infield Fly Balls and xFIP, there were some questions and debate about if popups are something under a pitcher’s control, or what you might call a skill. After reading the comments, I was somewhat doubting that my research might not have been thorough enough to essentially rule them out as a skill (which is what I more or less did).

If you look at popups per ball in play on a year-to-year basis, you get a correlation of about .52, which would highly suggest that there is some “skill” in inducing popups. However, there is a very strong positive correlation between popups and outfield-fly-balls (.64), and a very strong negative correlation between popups and groundballs (-.72).

In other words, as outfield-fly-balls increase, so do popups. As groundballs decrease, popups increase. For comparisons sake, line-drives have absolutely no correlation with popups.

Since the correlations are so high, you can basically come up with an expected popup rate based on a player’s groundball percentage. To me, it actually looks non-linear:

So it seems that each player has a dynamic expected popup rate based on his groundball percentage. Now the real question is, do players popup rates diverge from their expected popup rates consistently on a year to year basis?

If you look at the above chart, you’ll see that there’s not much consistency from year-to-year. The correlation is about .18, which pretty much agrees with Mitchel Lichtman’s findings of .14 as quoted in David Gassko’s Batted Ball DIPS article. For comparisons sake, BABIP has a year-to-year correlation of .15.

So what does this mean for popups as a “skill”? I’d say they are sort of a skill that is closely tied to groundball percentage, but from the findings above, that’s about as far as I’d go. While there may be certain pitchers that prove to be exceptions (just as there are exceptions with BABIP), popups in general do not seem to be much of an independent skill.

All batted ball data is from Baseball Info Solutions from 2006-2009 for pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched.