Total Zone with Location Data
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:
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
For those of us newbies who enjoy the differing defensive metrics, what TZL scores would be considered “awful”, “very poor”, “poor”, “below average”, “average”, “above average”, “good”, “very good” and excellent!
And are we still looking at 3 seasons of data to really get a statistical feel for a players value on defense, such as with UZR?
Cheers,
Matt
For 2009 the distribution for UZL and TZR are very similar.
I think doing something like the following is pretty reasonable. It’s similar to what we did for the fan projections.
-12.5 to -17.5 or below awful
-7.5 to -12.5 poor
-2.5 to -7.5 below average
-2.5 to 2.5 average
2.5 to 7.5 above average
7.5 to 12.5 good
12.5 to 17.5 or above excellent