Left fielders get no respect. At least, that's the case when it comes to defense.
Think about it. With the exception of a privileged few, like Barry Bonds, left fielders are always thought of as these massive clods who can't play any other position. Their managers just stick them out in left to keep them from hurting the team and hurting themselves. To most people, Greg Luzinski and Ron Kittle are the prototypes for left fielders.
And it isn't just the fans that hold this view; it's the view that is officially condoned by Major League Baseball. The decision years ago to allow Gold Gloves for outfield play to be handed out to any three outfielders, regardless of position, has resulted in left fielders being virtually ignored for their defensive contributions. Year after year, three center fielders are awarded, with an occasional strong-armed right fielder thrown in. In the forty-five seasons that Gold Gloves have been awarded, 135 have been given to American Leaguers. Just 19 of those went to left fielders, and never more than one in any year. Of those, 15 are accounted for by just four men - Carl Yastrzemski (7), Minnie Minoso (3), Joe Rudi (3) and Dave Winfield (2).
When Darin Erstad was awarded a Gold Glove in 2000, he was the first American League left fielder to be so awarded since Winfield in 1983. Even then, Winfield was a guy who made his reputation elsewhere, having already won two Gold Gloves as a right fielder in the National League. He didn't actually deserve the award in 1983, or the previous year for that matter. Several AL left fielders were better, but Winfield had the reputation that he brought with him from right field.
It's pretty silly when you consider it. First basemen are generally considered to be of lower defensive value than left fielders, yet they have their on Gold Gloves. I mean, even pitchers get their own Gold Gloves. Does anyone in their right mind think pitchers make a bigger contribution with their glove than left fielders do? That's ridiculous. Consider the best-fielding pitcher ever, Jim Kaat, owner of sixteen consecutive Gold Gloves. During those sixteen seasons, theoretically playing the greatest defense of any pitcher ever, Kaat averaged just 1.48 chances per outing. That's it. Even the worst-ever left fielder, let's say Lonnie Smith, averaged 1.90 chances per game. And that's a guy with truly awful range compared to the (supposedly) best fielding pitcher in baseball history. We've got to assume that the gap between an average pitcher and average left fielder is about a full chance per game. Multiply that by 140 to 160 games that a regular left fielder will play each year compared to the 35 starts a pitcher gets and we find that a left fielder will handle the ball about 250-275 more times per year than a pitcher. But somehow, it's the pitcher that we award for his glove work. Dumb, huh?
So, let's look back a bit. What if that dumb rule hadn't been in effect? What if a Gold Glove had been awarded to each outfield position, just as each infield position is awarded? Which left fielders would have received those awards each year, thus escaping the usual left field stereotype?
Of course, we're not going to be able to reproduce the real voting process. And thank God for that. I mean, this is the system that gave Rafael Palmeiro a Gold Glove for playing just 28 games at first base, and one of those awards to Joe Rudi was for playing that grand total of 44 outfield games in 1975. Obviously this isn't a system worth replicating, and since I'm not old enough to go by memory, we're going to have to dig into the wonderful world of defensive statistics. There are a couple of ways to go about this, and I've decided to try both.
First, the time consuming one. I used the fabulous Baseball-Reference.com site to determine each team's regular left fielder over the past 45 years, since Gold Gloves have been in existence. In some cases teams didn't have a true regular. They would have one guy who played 45 games in left and another two or three who played 20-30 games each. So I decided to make a rule, largely to avoid some stupid statistical anomaly that would give the award to a guy who played 25 games in left field. My rule was that no one would be eligible for the award unless they played at least half of their team's games in left field. I think you'll agree that's fair.
With each of these players identified, I simply plopped their defensive numbers into a spreadsheet. I figured each player's Putouts per Game, Assists per Chance, Double Plays per Chance, Fielding Percentage times Chances and Range Factor. These were used to level out the advantages that would have gone to those players who played 150 games instead of 120 or 110. But, to give them credit for durability, I also gave each player points based on the number of total outfield games played.
Here's the math, using Claudell Washington's 1975 season as an example. Washington played 148 games in the outfield, and totaled 305 putouts, 8 assists, 1 double play, a .978 fielding percentage and a 2.11 range factor (RF). These translate to 2.06 putouts per game (PO/G), .025 assists per chance (A/C), .003 double plays per chance (DP/C), and a 312.96 score in fielding percentage times chances (FP/C). With these calculated, we compare them to all of the other seven left fielders who qualified for the award that year. Washington ranked third in games, first in PO/G, sixth in A/C, fourth in DP/C, second in FP/C, and second in RF. After all of the ordinals are added, Washington has a total score of 18, which ranks second among the eight eligible left fielders. In other words, he's the runner-up for the Gold Glove. We'll call this one the Defensive Statistics Method, or DSF since all baseball stats have to have an acronym. I think it's a federal law.
Kind of ugly, but ultimately it works. We know this because the folks at Total Baseball have their own handy-dandy statistic, called Fielding Runs. Without getting too detailed, Fielding Runs (FR) calculates the numbers of runs each player contributed to his team each year based solely on defense. I won't replicate their math here, just trust that they've done a ton of work to make FR a meaningful measurement of defensive value. By comparing the highest FR scores each year we find that they track pretty closely with that math-heavy DSF I described with the help of Claudell Washington. I looked at all American League seasons from 1957 through 1998. For 28 of those 42 years, the Gold Glove winner determined by DSF matched with the winner determined by FR. In eleven of the remaining fourteen seasons, the winner in DSF finished second or third in FR. Not too bad - agreement two-thirds of the time and near-agreement for about 80% of the remainder. There is only one true outlier, the 1970 season, during which FR favors Roy White while DSF favors Felipe Alou, who was a subpar outfielder (-3 FR) according to Total Baseball that season. Hey, what are ya gonna do? I still think we've got a pretty good basis for determining who deserved a left field Gold Glove in those years.
Since there has been just one tie for a Gold Glove in the in the history of the award, we need a tie-breaker between the two methods. To try to bring this decision into alignment with reality, I decided that the best way to break ties would be to replicate the ridiculous pattern the actual voters use and give the Gold Glove to whichever player had the better offensive year. It's stupid, but it's reality. In that case, the winners would be:
1957 Charlie Maxwell
1958 Bob Cerv
1959 Minnie Minoso
1960 Minnie Minoso
1961 Rocky Colavito
1962 Rocky Colavito
1963 Carl Yastrzemski
1964 Chuck Hinton
1965 Bob Allison
1966 Carl Yastrzemski
1967 Carl Yastrzemski
1968 Carl Yastrzemski
1969 Lou Piniella
1970 Roy White
1971 Carl Yastrzemski
1972 Lou Piniella
1973 Johnny Briggs
1974 Johnny Briggs
1975 Roy White
1976 Larry Hisle
1977 Carl Yastrzemski
1978 Jim Rice
1979 Willie Wilson
1980 Rickey Henderson
1981 Rickey Henderson
1982 Gary Ward
1983 Gary Ward
1984 Jim Rice
1985 Phil Bradley
1986 Jim Rice
1987 Jose Canseco
1988 Dan Gladden
1989 Rickey Henderson
1990 Dan Gladden
1991 Tim Raines
1992 Brady Anderson
1993 Albert Belle
1994 Tony Phillips
1995 Marty Cordova
1996 Tony Phillips
1997 Albert Belle
1998 Albert Belle
There were three tough judgement calls in there that went against Roy White, Ben Oglivie and Tim Raines, respectively, but there they are. Notice how much reputation comes into play in the actual voting. Of the few left fielders who actually did receive multiple Gold Gloves, all of them had their totals decreased using these methods. Yastrzemski and Minoso each lost one award, while Rudi and Winfield lost all of theirs.
I know, I know. You're probably saying, "Yeah, but how good could these guys be compared to REAL Gold Glove winners? Center fielders and right fielders are just more valuable as defenders, so who cares if these guys got snubbed?" Well, these guys actually compare very well. The real, live Gold Glove recipients average just about 9 Fielding Runs in their awarded seasons. The left fielders above average just about 13 FR in these seasons. So who was more valuable defensively to their respective teams?
Of these forty-two seasons, just eight were actually awarded with a Gold Glove - Minoso in 1959 and 1960, Yastrzemski in 1963, 1967, 1968, 1971, and 1977, and Henderson in 1981. (Wilson also received one award, but in 1980, not 1979. And Yaz and Minoso each collected an additional award that they probably didn't deserve.) The rest of these men were essentially stiffed by the lords of baseball, with the result that many of them - Cerv, Colavito, Piniella, Hisle, Rice, Ward, Canseco, and Belle - are generally remembered as bad defenders or as slow designated hitters. It's simply not true. Under a fair awards system, each of these men would have likely received one or more Gold Gloves. In fact, in Rice's and Belle's cases, each would have received three Gold Gloves, tied for the second most among all American League left fielders, trailing only Yastrzemski's six.
That's inherently unfair to these men, particularly Rice, who is currently beating his head against a ceiling in Hall of Fame voting largely because he's depicted as one-dimensional. How different would it be for him if his bio said, "3-time Gold Glove winner", in addition to his 382 home runs?
Unfortunately, because of a really stupid rule, we'll never know.
» You can read more of Paul White's work at www.lostinleftfield.com.
Also by Paul White
» A Case for the Hall of Fame
» Good Manners and Poor Logic: Brock Was No Gwynn
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: The Also Rans
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Two Right Fielders
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Slot #5, Rich Gossage
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot - The Starters I Left Behind
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Slot #4, Jim Rice
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Trammell & Smith
» My 2002 Hall of Fame Ballot: Slot #1, Gary Carter
» Happy Birthday Bob Elliott
» 3,000 Hits That Don't Belong in Cooperstown
» Frankie Frisch's Sad Legacy: The Cheapening of The Hall of Fame
» Babe's MVP Snubs
» The Schalk-Schang Redemption: Two Men Who Prove That The Hall of Fame Veterans Committee Was a Sham
» Being Tony Muser
» More submissions
Copyright © 2002 by Paul White. Posted March 27, 2002.
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