>From today's Herald Red Sox blog. This is me feeling vindicated for contending >Jason Bay was not the lousy outfielder we were all told he was in the >off-season:
-- Matt UZR owes Jason Bay an apology This slipped through the cracks, but the good folks at FanGraphs — who are constantly tweaking their formulas in an effort to make them as accurate as possible — recently tackled what many within the game considered one of the biggest flaws of UZR, or Ultimate Zone Rating, which was treated as Gospel this winter during all the discussions of defense around these parts. That flaw was UZR’s inability to handle quirky parks like Fenway, where left field and center field are of such strange configurations, they cannot be judged with a cookie cutter model. It turns out that Mitchel Lichtman, the creator of UZR, agreed, so he augmented his model to better gauge things like left field at Fenway, or right field in Minnesota, or the entire outfield at Coors, as the FanGraphs people explain. The upshot of these changes is that most players were relatively unaffected. However — and this is a big however — one player had his UZR significantly altered by the fixes, which were retroactively applied to old data: Jason Bay. The former Red Sox outfielder, who was killed all winter for his horrendous defense (which was part of the justification for letting him sign a free agent deal with the Mets) saw his UZR shift from minus-13.8 runs to plus-1.9. Bay’s play in 2009 obviously didn’t change. Only the numbers did. And the new numbers say Bay was not horribly below average last year, but in fact saved the Red Sox a couple of runs in left. It wouldn’t have made a difference as far as the Red Sox re-signing Bay — we now know that was an impossibility once their deal collapsed at the All-Star break over his medicals — but it would have at least changed the narrative. Maybe fans and media members wouldn’t have been so quick to give up on the biggest bat in the lineup if they hadn’t been able to lean on the “he can’t play defense” crutch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Red Sox Citizens" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/redsoxcitizens?hl=en.
