May 27, 2008
A Little Defense
Nick Cafardo makes Dustin Pedroia the center of his piece on the Red Sox 5-3 win over the Mariners Monday night. He notes a defensive play in the third as a key moment in the game:
Take the play he made in the third inning of last night's 5-3 win over the Mariners: runners at first and second, two outs, when Jose Lopez hit a ball that for all intents and purposes should have gone through into right field for a run-producing hit. Yet Pedroia, who was positioned more toward second base, got a good jump on the ball and made a diving play to the first base side to retire Lopez and keep Bartolo Colon out of peril.
(Actually, there were runners at first and third.)
I saw the play last night and watched it again this morning. It was a nice play by Dustin, the kind that separates a good fielder from a bad one. It's an easy out if the fielder is positioned differently. Pedroia showed on that play what we normally consider range, the ability to cover a lot of ground to get to a ball.
When I run the Probabalistic Model of Range, I define range as the ability to turn a ball into an out. Positioning plays a large role in that. One would expect the players that can make up for being out of position on a ball with their ability to cover ground will tend to score higher in the rankings. Maybe when we get Joe Maddon's GPS system we'll know for sure.
Posted by David Pinto at
07:56 AM
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Defense
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In European Soccer they started with a device for international caps where they would keep track of each players movement and the correlation between players. What I remember is that the range for a soccer player during the 90 minutes of a game is around 11km (approx. 6 and a half mile) 10 % of that in sprint. They installed cameras on the rooftop of the stadiums dividing the pitch in a gridiron and a computer calculates distances and speed for each player.
They should be able to come up with something similiar to that in MLB to rate the range of a player
Joerg from Vienna, Austria
Is that data available Joerg? It'd be incredibly interesting to look at.