So, my All-Star ballot talk with Stephen got me interested in Dashiell R. Faireborn and his 13+ Zone rating. I mean, how good is he, right? The next guys are at 6.8 and 6.9, so does that mean he’s twice as good? And twice as good, relative to what? My point on the podcast was that this was an big-assed, audacious number, but am I right?
Part of the issue is that we don’t completely know what ZR is doing, and there’s a bit of noise in it. And, at the end of the day what we really care about is what happen on the field. I’ve been working on that problem with the script I wrote that parses game logs and gives us “true” data on team defense as OOTP’s engine sees it (note to self: update for June…). But that study can’t really help because I can’t yet get to individual stats.
Luckily, OOTP comes to the rescue here, because (assuming no bugs), a simple filter on defensive stats allows anyone who wants to look more deeply into individual performance to do so. So that’s what I did this morning. I took a defensive filter that included all the BIZ columns, then filtered by shortstop, and pulled a report into my browser. I pasted that into Excel…Voila!…instant database. From that point, I:
- Sorted out players with less than 100 Total Chances
- Ignored the “Impossible” column
- Calculated the total number of plays actually made by each shortstop and the total number of BIZ in all other columns.
- Added up all the BIZ of each quality (Routine, Expected, etc), and calculated the percentage of plays made of each across the entire league.
- Assumed these calculations represented an average defensive performance for a shortstop.
- For each player’s BIZ scatter, calculated the number of Plays Made an average shortstop would be expected to make given the same opportunity.
- Calculated each shortstop’s current “Plays Above Average” by subtracting the average player’s Plays Made from his actual plays.
Bottom line is, yes, Dashiell R. Faireborn looks like a freak. But, then again, so does Jared Thealer, just in an opposite fashion. Faireborn registers 23.9 plays above the average fielder—a number that is a massive outlier and, quite honestly, makes me feel better about my All-Star vote. At the end of the day, the PAA gap between Faireborn and the next guy is actually bigger than the gap in his Zone ratings (note, I think this is because on routine plays, he’s merely good rather than scintillating).
I have no idea if he’s going to keep this level of dominance up. I also don’t know how the league’s ratings will move over time (remember, these numbers are created by the relative performance of the players…which are obviously affected by their ratings, but while ratings are solid, on-field performance is relative—if every shortstop in the league suddenly became 11/11/11/11, Faireborn would become below average).
But, let’s say he did keep this up.
Are we watching a young Ozzie Smith at play?