From: hbrooks@uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu (Harold_Brooks)
Subject: Ozzie's defense (Was Re: Mattingly discussion, take 2.)
Organization: NSSL
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 16:06:07 GMT

In article <92352.051418RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> <RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> writes:
>first off, while i am sure that there have been gold glove winners
>who were the best (defensively) at their position, in general, the
>award is one big popularity contest.  mattingly, like ozzie smith,
>wins because he used to be good.  i think he's still slightly above
>average, but he's not the best.  not by a long shot.

Not to be critical of Bob, but I thought I'd take a look at Ozzie's 
defense, using DA, over the '88-'91 period to see how true the 
statement that Ozzie "wins [Gold Gloves] because he used to be good."
Now, Ozzie's defense definitely slipped over that period, but the 
only year he didn't lead the league in DA was '91.

Year  Ozzie  League
        DA     DA
1988  .742    .667
1989  .717    .652
1990  .697    .642
1991  .672    .656

Let's look at the '91 numbers of the leaders to see if there's any
justification for Ozzie getting the Gold Glove in '91.  The 
candidates are-

Player     G   GOps  DA    FE  TE  Err  DOps  DP%
Belliard  145  445  .734   12   6   18   97  .268
Griffin   109  460  .699   18   4   22   89  .292
Uribe      87  282  .692    9   2   11   49  .306
Larkin    120  482  .685   11   5   16   86  .302
Owen      133  463  .677    6   2    8   80  .275
Smith     150  507  .672    6   2    8   94  .340
Thon      146  543  .660   17   4   21  102  .206

(GOps-number of ground balls hit into shortstop zone.  
DA=Outs on ground balls/GOps  FE=Fielding Errors, TE=Throwing Errors,
Err=Total Errors.  DOps=Double play opportunities.  DP%=
DPs turned.)

Thon didn't do anything as well and was the best of the remaining
shortstops, so we'll drop him and the rest of the crowd (Fernandez,
Elster, Dunston, Bell, and Blauser).  

I've dinked around with the numbers some and I'll admit freely 
that some of the assumptions are a little shaky.  Ozzie starts 
double plays better than any of the players above him in DA.  While
some of that is certainly due to Oquendo at second, just for fun,
I'll give all the credit to Ozzie.  Let's compute an adjusted DA
by adding the extra outs on DPs.  (To take care of the different
number of opportunities, I normalized the opportunities (DOps) to be
.2*GOps.)  Then, I went back and computed the number of outs the
shortstops would have made with Ozzie's 507 GOps.  

Player     Adj. DA  Outs/507 GOps
Belliard    .798        404.4
Larkin      .764        387.2
Owen        .763        386.7
Griffin     .761        385.8
Uribe       .759        385.0
Smith       .752        381.1

So, except for Belliard, the difference between Smith and anyone
else on the list is less than ~6 plays, for the number of ground
balls that Ozzie saw.  That's pretty close to being able to throw
a blanket over them.  Here we come to the playing time issue, 
though.  Again, other than Belliard, Ozzie played in 17 more games
than anyone else in the group.  I think that should count for 
something.  As a result, I think the only player that might have
deserved the Gold Glove more than Ozzie was Belliard.  Again, he
had a lot of partial games (he saw 3.1 GOps/game played, while 
Braves' shortstops as a whole saw 4.0), so Ozzie might even get
some brownie points on playing time on Rafael.

After looking at the DA numbers and playing time for 1991, I've
come to the conclusion that Ozzie Smith was no worse than the 
second best defensive shortstop in the NL, after having been the
best for 1988-1990.  The decision to give him the Gold Glove in 
1991 was not unwarranted.  Despite a significant fall-off in his
skills from 1988, he remained near the top of NL shortstops, 
defensively.  (Since the data is not in yet, I can't say anything
about the 1992 award.)

Harold
-- 
Harold Brooks                    hbrooks@uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu
National Severe Storms Laboratory (Norman, OK)
"Better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late."
--Branch Rickey
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