In February, Sean (“Chone”) Smith applied his TotalZone defensive metric to the last few years of minor league data. The resulting numbers confirmed some opinions, questioned some conventional wisdom, and helped us better understand the relationship between fielding at various levels of professional baseball. Sean or I will probably go further in depth when the 2009 season is in the books, but while we wait, we’ve run TZ for the full-season minors through games of July 31. Read on for some of the highlights. … Notable to my eye, though with extra sample-size caveats, is Gordon Beckham (yes, at shortstop), who comes in at +6 in very limited time at the position. It’s encouraging to see him there, since my own college fielding algorithm rated Beckham one of the best defenders in the college game in 2007-08. And—lookee here!—just above Beckham on the 2007-08 college list is…Brandon Crawford! For all the warnings we have to throw around with defensive stats, it’s great to see different systems supporting each other.
For more players go to minorleaguesplits.com. Here’s Tyler Flowers ; Click “Defense.” And Jordan Danks. And Dayan Viciedo. And Jared Mitchell.
