Gold Gloves Are About Defense… Right?

When Juan Soto was announced as a finalist for the Gold Glove this year, I was perplexed. To say that the right fielder struggled with his defense this season would be an understatement. As recently as Game 2 of the NLCS, he was still making (or, failing to make) plays like this:

So I turned to Rawlings’ official website to get a better understanding of how Gold Gloves are won. In order to qualify for a Gold Glove, infielders and outfielders must have played in the field for at least 698 innings through their teams’ first 138 games. Maybe Soto grades out better in this subsample. In the absence of custom date ranges for advanced fielding statistics, I compared Soto to the 76 other players who were in the outfield for at least 698 innings on the season. Here is where he ranked:

Both Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) peg him as below average, and Outs Above Average (OAA) has him as abysmal, ranking him dead last.

Going just off of those numbers, Soto makes no sense as a finalist. However, there’s another key Rawlings criterion that may have made him more appealing: infielders and outfielders who played the field for the requisite 698 innings only qualify at the position they played the most. Due to this added wrinkle, there were only five other outfielders besides the three finalists in the National League that could be considered: Hunter Renfroe, Nick Castellanos, Starling Marte, Seiya Suzuki, and Randal Grichuk. Here are Soto’s ranks among those five:

Still not great. But there’s one thing that elevates Soto above all five of those players: his offensive production. Per Rawlings’ official site, Gold Gloves do not take offense into account and are decided in part by a fielder’s SABR Defensive Index, a composite measure of defense that includes six distinct data sources. But there is also a voting component — specifically, the manager and six coaches from each team vote. Besides the inability to vote for their own players or players outside of their league, there are no restrictions on who they can vote for among the qualifiers.

It stands to reason that, given how people view Soto as a generational talent based on all of his skills combined, they will extend that view to each of his individual skills, including his defense. This is an example of the halo effect, a mental shortcut that describes the human tendency to attribute specific positive characteristics to another person or thing based on a generally positive opinion of them.

I ran some statistical tests on this year’s and last year’s Gold Glove finalists in order to lend my theory more evidence. First, I compared Gold Glove finalists to their qualified peers. For infielders and outfielders, this meant playing at least 698 innings of defense on the season (all positions played combined). For catchers, the Rawlings criterion is that they must have played in at least 69 of their team’s first 138 games to qualify for Gold Glove consideration. It does not specify a minimum amount of innings, nor does it specify whether all 69 of those games had to have come at catcher. So I counted a player as a qualified catcher as long as they played at least 69 games on the season, their primary position was catcher, and they logged at least 500 total innings in the field. I also excluded the new utility category since this would render comparisons across years difficult. Here are the results:

Not only are these numbers almost identical across the two seasons, but when you put them together, they also form one statistically significant result: on average, Gold Glove finalists are significantly better hitters than their qualified peers.

Naturally, Gold Glove finalists also tend to grade out as better fielders than their qualified peers:

Piecing these last two findings together, you might be wondering if better hitters are also better fielders in general. In other words, is the halo effect a good bias to have when it comes to choosing Gold Glove winners?

Well, for this year and last, wRC+ was not significantly correlated with DRS and UZR among qualified fielders. This year, wRC+ was weakly correlated with OAA, but not in the way you might think:

On average, a one-point increase in wRC+ corresponded with a 0.51-point decrease in OAA. Among Gold Glove finalists across the last two years, the trend was even more stark: a one-point increase in wRC+ corresponded with a 1.37-point decrease in OAA.

Further solidifying this finding, DRS was also negatively correlated with wRC+ among finalists: a one-point increase in wRC+ corresponded with a 0.89-point decrease in DRS. OAA is not calculated for catchers, but DRS is, so its inclusion here is an important stipulation. Overall, it seems the worst-fielding Gold Glove finalists tended to be the best-hitting. Coupled with the fact that Gold Glove finalists tend to fare better at the plate than other qualified fielders, this leads me to believe that the halo effect helps bolster certain candidacies on the basis of their hitting prowess.

I say certain candidacies because this isn’t always the case. Take Jackie Bradley Jr., who has a great reputation with the glove but has struggled with the bat the last two years to the tune of a 46 wRC+. Though his defense hasn’t been amazing, he has been a Gold Glove finalist each of the last two years likely due to his storied fielding fame. If a player’s candidacy is borderline, like Soto’s and Bradley’s, reputation seems more likely to play a role. For Bradley, a past Gold Glove lies behind the reputation; for Soto, it’s more likely that his hitting ability has subtly influenced how the coaches who vote view him.

There was one more test I wanted to run. How much does any of this really matter in terms of deciding the ultimate Gold Glove winner? While Soto is a finalist, he is only one of three alongside Daulton Varsho and Mookie Betts, the top two in OAA among NL right fielders. The chances of Soto winning are slim, right? Well, the ultimate winners last year outpaced the losing finalists in wRC+ 114 to 107 on average. It’s a small sample — I could only use 16 winning hitters and 32 losing hitters — but the result bears mentioning.

Soto only bested Betts by one point in wRC+, and Betts is clearly the better defender, so I would still put my money on the Dodger garnering more votes than the Padre. And we can’t forget Varsho, who was tops in the NL at his position in OAA. But keep an eye on this year’s winners overall to see if the trend holds.