Pages

November 03, 2010

Even baseball sabermetric stat geeks get it wrong at times

Here's a great blog post at Baseball-Prospectus - would you first take George Brett, Ken Griffey Jr. or Reggie Jackson?

Jackson has the best OPS+ of the three, actually, even with his lower BA; Brett and Jr. tie for second.

That said, I love all the people touting Griffey for his D.

He actually has a career negative rating on both fielding runs and defensive WAR:

His last positive year was in 2000, at age 30, the year after his last Gold Glove (in which he had horribly bad numbers, actually).

Hell, on just the offensive side, Sheffield ranks as well as Junior.

Now, is he still a first-round HOFer? Sure. But, let's not quite tout him as one of the greatest half-dozen outfielders of all time. Top 20? Quite possibly. No higher than that, though. (Reggie also has more stolen bases than Junior, as well as the higher OPS+, among other food for thought.)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Your comments are appreciated, as is at least a modicum of politeness.
Comments are moderated, so yours may not appear immediately.
Due to various forms of spamming, comments with professional websites, not your personal website or blog, may be rejected.