['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by mr. tegu

That is different than the simple DRS which has Hosmer at 3. How exactly it is different I don't know, though it seems to include some more advanced adjustments.

But on that stat, Davis is -13.5 and Loney is -5 so to point to that stat as something clearly against Hosmer compared to his competition doesn't really hold up. It seems to me across the board they are all pretty equal.

Fangraphs augments. They account for arm strength, double plays turned, range runs, and error runs with positional adjustments.

The guy who should actually win, IMO, is Trumbo. Davis qualifies as an atrocious defender, but that's never stopped GG in the past.

Here's their explanation:

This is where the upgrade was needed the most. Prior to this rollout, we listed “Fld” as our primary defensive rating on both the dashboard and the fielding section, which solely rated players relative to average at their specific positions, but that treats all positions as if they are equal in value, which is clearly not true. Pretty much every shortstop is a better defender than every first baseman, even the ones with negative ratings at SS compared to the guys with positive ratings at 1B. But, with the Fld metric, this wasn’t always obvious, and it led to people using a metric that rates players at their position as if that was their standing in the league overall.

By adding the positional adjustment into the fielding rating to create Defense, we’re now presenting a much better view of who the best defenders actually are. Catchers get a big boost here as well, as they have the largest positional adjustment of any spot on the field, and this better recognizes their contributions, even if they aren’t necessarily rated dramatically higher than other catchers. Just being a catcher has a lot of value, and this helps display that value more correctly.

There are some other ancillary benefits to displaying things in this matter as well. Since these are counting stats, playing time is explicitly included, so a player who has posted a .400 wOBA over 150 games will grade out better than a player who had the same .400 wOBA in only 100 games. Rate stats can be very useful, but when counting total value, you also want to give players credit for staying in the line-up every day. Now, instead of having to just cite wOBA or wRC+ and then adjust for both playing time and baserunning value, those are already baked into the Offense column.

This also helps level the playing field for guys who shift between positions. Utility players who spend parts of their season at multiple positions, or even regulars who bounce around between spots like Ben Zobrist, do not have their defensive performance easily described by a single UZR rating. If a guy plays five positions and has a +5 UZR, you don’t really know what that +5 is relative to. Now, with the fielding component added in, you know that the baseline is an average defender across all positions.


And, finally, if you don’t want to try to spend time talking about what a replacement level player is, this gives you an easy way to simply compare players relative to league average, a baseline that is easily understood without any explanation. Replacement level is an important concept, but there are times it is not necessary to add in those extra runs, and a comparison to average will do just fine. For those times, these metrics now make those citations easier.

You will find Off and Def — the shorthand labels for these numbers — in the Dashboard and Value sections of the player pages and the leaderboards, starting immediately. These will be added to the custom dashboard options in the near future. As always, a big thanks to site founder/owner/overlord David Appelman for his hard work, and we hope you find these two new numbers as useful as we do.