Tyner = Hunter ?!

by BeefMaster on Jun 5, 2007 5:38 PM EDT

Is the Tyniest outfielder as valuable as everyone's favorite homerun robber? According to some metrics, yes he is.

An article today at the sports blog Sportszilla made a claim that I thought you here at TwinkieTown would have some good, strong opinions on, one way or the other. The article started straightforward enough, discussing the underrated value of fielding when people propose trades, underpinned with quite a bit of statistical analysis (primarily Ultimate Zone Rating), before moving on to their central thesis, a discussion of a Fire Joe Morgan post that they thought was unjustly harsh toward the idea of a straight-up Hunter-for-A-Rod trade posited by Howard Sinker in his blog for the Star-Tribune.

This is where it gets interesting. According to Sportszilla, the trade would be great for the Twins not just because it's an upgrade at third base (duh), but because it would occur without a downgrade in center field. "What?!" I hear you all asking. "If Torii were gone, the Twins would have to put someone like Jason Tyner there!"

Exactly. According to their stats, Hunter's offense is pretty much average for centerfielders, and UZR has him at one win above average in the field. Tyner comes in at 1.5 wins below average at the plate, as we'd all expect, but UZR says that he is worth 2.5 wins above average as a centerfielder. Add that up, and either player is worth one extra win to his team over the average centerfielder.

What say you, TwinkieTown? Are these fielding metrics a load of hooey, skewed by sample size or pure unreliability? Have we been panicking about the centerfielder of the immediate future too much, ignoring a good one sitting just down the bench? What are everyone's personal observations of Tyner's defense, for those like me who don't get to see many games?

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Um...

I want to know where they got their metrics to make those statements about Jason Tyner. Actually, no, where the metrics came from period.

I think a number of CF are having good seasons, but saying Hunter's offensive production from CF is "average" just isn't true. Most starting CF in baseball will not put up Hunter numbers.

And what about Tyner's numbers in the field? His range is okay, and his arm is okay, but he isn't making unbelievable plays are displaying a laser-guided rocket for an arm. What the hell?

by Jesse on Jun 5, 2007 6:10 PM EDT 0 recs

Tyner's sample size in CF...

...is beyond small. He's played roughly the equivalent of 25 games there over the last 5+ years (2002-present). A CF probably gets roughly 3-4 attempts per game. It'd be like trying to judge a hitter on 75-100 AB. You would have a batting average, but how useful would that batting average be?

Beyond that, UZR is only one piece of the pie. Everyone involved with defensive metrics (including MGL, creator of UZR), knows that they are a work in progress, and that any sort of real defensive assessment has to take into account multiple defense metrics, and of course, plain old observation. (That's one reason that Tangotiger has done the fan scouting reports the last few years.)

That said, some defensive metrics like Torii Hunter a lot (John Dewan's +/- I believe is one of them), and others see him as average. I wonder if positioning isn't part of the issue. To me, Torii always seems to play pretty deep, because he loves to take away the HR. And there's certainly value in that--value I think the metrics don't capture well--but he's probably also giving away some outs on hits in front of him. It's like the flip side of the OBP vs. SLG debate. In a normal game situation, is it better to make sure the other team makes outs, or is it better to keep them from getting extra bases?

Anyway, saying Torii Hunter is average based just on his UZR is like saying that Jason Tyner was a great hitter last year because he hit .312. Sure, that .312 average was nice, but if you look past that to see what his OBP and SLG are, and things like that, you see that he really wasn't especially valuable. That doesn't mean that batting average is worthless, it just means that it's one piece of the puzzle.

by ubelmann on Jun 5, 2007 6:34 PM EDT 0 recs

Thanks

for gathering the actual facts on that. Somehow your facts have vindicated my mind, since my comment bore no data whatsoever.

by Jesse on Jun 5, 2007 6:57 PM EDT up 0 recs

UZR

I hate to rail into metrics, but it is dubious that Tyner is better than Hunter in center. I have looked at the charts for the various flavors of Zone Rating, and they never fail to produce a few head scratchers. The most glaring for Twins fans might have been the good ZR stats for Batista.

I probably have more respect for Hunter's glove than anyone in the blogosphere, so I'm biased. And range is hard to quantify. But few Sabermetricians are that high on stats like UZR because of the glaring anomalies. One way to invalidate the numbers is to look at the year to year stats. Take Hunter's stats from two consecutive healthy years and you will see wild fluctuations in his ZR, UZR or whatever. One thing Hunter is is consistent (when healthy).

I've said it a bunch of times here, but the thing all flavors of ZR have in common is treating all batted balls as equal. The better defensive metrics at least recognize that a line drive is tougher to get to than a pop-up. UZR doesn't distinguish between types of ball in play, and that is it's primary weakness.

As for their respective offensive numbers, it's not even close. I mean, come on! Hunter has more power and better slugging than all but a handful of the top center fielders. Tyner has never hit one home run in his entire career. And trying to hit them has caused him to stop doing the one thing he does well--slap the ball to left.

Get well soon, Joe.

by cmathewson on Jun 5, 2007 7:00 PM EDT 0 recs

Misconception

I've said it a bunch of times here, but the thing all flavors of ZR have in common is treating all batted balls as equal.

That's not true for UZR, actually. Each batted ball gets assigned a vector, so it has a direction and a speed. Some systems don't do it this way, others do. The info is basically there, though. (Check out Hit Tracker Online for one interesting application of the data that BIS provides.)

Honestly, positioning data is what is most lacking right now, and I think it cuts to the heart of the matter with Hunter. I think that the data available is basically consistent with the idea that Hunter positions himself pretty deep. So even if he has more range than other CF, more stuff is going to drop in front of him.

John Dewan's Fielding Bible has some really great charts in it (though the data is from way back in 2005 now), and you can see that Hunter scores well in zones behind him, but below average in the short center "no man's land" area behind 2B.

Another big problem is that rather than assessing ability (which is something that stats like, say, strikeout rate, AVG, or OBP do), most defensive stats roll together ability and value (which is something stats like VORP and EQA do.) I'm basically suggesting that Hunter is a high-OBP, low-SLG fielder, if you go with an analogy to offense. Now, if the data were broken down more, so I could see how Hunter did on XBH vs. singles, for instance, we could have a better idea whether or not my assertion is correct. But since everything is rolled into one, it's tougher to say.

John Walsh at The Hardball Times is doing some really interesting studies just by sort of surveying the landscape and not trying to roll everything into one all-encompassing measure. You can see his first two articles here and here. For being stats articles, they are really not mathy at all, because they don't need to be.

by ubelmann on Jun 5, 2007 8:06 PM EDT up 0 recs

Good insight on Hunter

He does play deeper than most (though not as deep as Kirby did). That means he can't get to the loping liners in front of him as well. And he typically gets good jumps. But he is often fooled by sluggers taking big swings and hitting looping liners off the end of the bat in front of him.

Get well soon, Joe.

by cmathewson on Jun 6, 2007 12:36 AM EDT up 0 recs

I'd

I'd anecotally say (without having actually seen him hardly at all since last year) that he's about average at this point at balls in front of him, above average to quite good on balls in the gap and absolutely superb on balls hit behind him. That's not a bad combo at all as he does what is expected on the basehits and does a great job doing things like cutting balls off and keeping guys to singles and making big, game saving catches deep in gap or even over the wall. We could debate all day about if it would help if he played more shallow sometimes (maybe he could play against the single a little more often when the situation demands? Does he already do that? I wouldn't be surprised.) but the bottom line is he catches a lot of balls an average fielder does not and holds guys from a lot of extra bases with his arm. he's diminished somewhat, but (until he gets hurt again) is still a great fielder out there.

Baseball is great because you cant take a knee or kill the clock. You gotta put the ball over the plate and give the other guy his damn shot E Weaver abridged

by AdamOnFirst on Jun 6, 2007 3:13 AM EDT up 0 recs

Ah

Now I see why they said that. Tyner is most definitely worse in center than Hunter. Tyner is wore in center that Ford too. in fact, Tyner isn't very good in center at all. He does well at the corners, but he doesn't have the range or nearly the arm to play center well.

Honestly, I don't really use defensive matrices at all. I find them flawed in theory and results. The only defensive numbers I'll use are throwing out baserunners for catchers and errors. They just don't do a very good job yet.

Baseball is great because you cant take a knee or kill the clock. You gotta put the ball over the plate and give the other guy his damn shot E Weaver abridged

by AdamOnFirst on Jun 5, 2007 7:01 PM EDT 0 recs

Pretty much what I expected

You guys basically echoed my sentiments on the article - I recall Tyner getting some time in CF while Torii was hurt last year, but not all that much, and it seems to me like this is a case of small sample size in action. 2.5 games seems like an incredible amount to single-handedly make a difference in the field for anyone except a first baseman who can't catch or something.

I found it funny that the writer of the article was so gung-ho about his uber-stats and didn't bother to see whether Tyner had played in enough games that his results made any amount of sense.

by BeefMaster on Jun 5, 2007 9:31 PM EDT 0 recs

Flag

Personal Blog Foul. Misuse of Statistics. 15 yards. On the defense. Repeat second down.

Baseball is great because you cant take a knee or kill the clock. You gotta put the ball over the plate and give the other guy his damn shot E Weaver abridged

by AdamOnFirst on Jun 5, 2007 9:46 PM EDT 0 recs