UZR Tidbits Through 4/26

by
April 27, 2009

The baseball season is less of a dash and more of a marathon, which is bad news for those of you who took Nelson Cruz in your UZR seasonal pools. Cruz leads by a half of a run over Jay Bruce, and nearly two full runs over Franklin Gutierrez and Placido Polanco.

You can tell the sample size is still small, because Raul Ibanez of all people has a positive UZR. Even more odd: he’s equal to Endy Chavez – the guy responsible for replacing Raul’s grit and work ethic. I wish a beat writer would ask Raul about his thoughts on defensive metrics now.

Aubrey Huff should probably only be used at DH. Thus far his UZR at first base is -3.5. Take that with the normal sample size warnings – like all of these pieces – but being poor defensively at first base generally means you aren’t very good defensively at all. Other poor defenders this season: Yuniesky Betancourt (-4.1, SS),Vernon Wells (-3.8, CF), Khalil Greene (-3.6, SS) and Nate McLouth (-3.6, CF). Gold Glove be damned.

What do Jordan Schafer Elvis Andrus share, besides their historic ties to the Atlanta Braves? Well, neither are making much headway defensively. I guess if we’re looking for an Evan Longoria-esque defensive rookie season, these two might not be the ones to hand your hat on.

Team rankings wise, the Rays are the leaders (13.9), with the Brewers (10.4), Pirates (9.7), Mariners (7.4), and Rangers (6.5) rounding out the top five. Meanwhile the Orioles (-11.3), Angels (-8.1), and Indians (-8) are the worst.

One has to figure the Orioles will finish the season better off than the Angels defense, right?

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

12 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Bill
16 years ago

The weird thing is, Ibanez actually has been playing a pretty decent left field lately, maybe it helps to play in the smaller CBP next to Victorino?

0