Anthony Volpe won the GG at shortstop, the marquee defensive position on every ballfield. Congrats. Hooray. Yabadabadoo.
But, yeesh, I dunno about this. Some thoughts...
1. It's weird, a guy with 17 errors, ranked 9th among qualifiers, winning the GG. Nope, check that: It's flat-out bizarre. Volpe has nearly three times the errors of Carlos Correa, who also has a better fielding percentage. Basically, the Powers That Be are saying Volpe is a great fielder... if you ignore the errors. WTF?
2. In the early season, some folks questioned Volpe's arm, suggesting he will eventually move to 2B. Some were saying he's not even be the best defensive SS on the Yankees. (That could be Oswald Peraza.) Over the season, Volpe definitely improved. But - seriously - Gold Glove?
3. I recall Baltimore management extolling the virtues of SS Jorge Mateo - even comparing him to Mark Belanger and Cal Ripken. When I heard that, I just assumed they were doing what many teams do: hyping a young guy who wasn't hitting. (He hit .217.) Now, I wonder if that's what happened with Volpe. Because offensively, Volpe's rookie season was a disaster. (He hit .209.)
4. The Clint Frazier conundrum. A few years back, during the Covid meltdown, Red Thunder somehow was named as a finalist for the Gold Glove in left field - despite the fact that every fly ball hit his way was a Stephen King horror novel. Yank fans knew this. Frazier knew this. He was often replaced in the late innings, to buttress the defense. How could the GG awards committee not know this? The answer? Well...
5. The answer may lay in numbers - provided by the Society for American Baseball Research. (I shit you not; this is a real thing.) Every year, the Society puts out defensive stats, which are supposed to make up 25 percent of the decision-making input on the GG awards. (Most of it is supposed to come from the voting of managers and coaches.)
One major calculation is the DWAR - Defensive Wins Above Replacement. And perhaps, therein lies the explanation.
There are two ultimate secrets in this world: The formula for Coke, and how WAR is calculated. I look at DWAR and shake my head. It's just a number. But Volpe had the highest DWAR among AL qualifiers. Do the managers and coaches agree? Is DWAR the almighty new way of rating fielders?
Dunno. But it used to be that the great fielding shortstops were artistic, almost majestic, in how they made plays. Think of Ozzie Smith. Davey Concepcion. Barry Larkin. Our own Number 2.
I just didn't see Volpe that way. Congrats are in order. But even a Gold Glove can clank.
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20 comments:
Didn't Tino once lose the GG to a DH?
The real downside is that GG winner Volpe really needs to move to second and now that "obvious" move might not happen.
Also, nice comparison to the Golden Globes. Yes, it sure seems that way.
Basically, the Powers That Be are saying Volpe is a great fielder... if you ignore the errors.
My father was fond of saying, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
@LBJ, Good one, I'm going to store that one in my memory bank, thanks!
@Doug, Yep, they'll never move him to 2B now.
Duque, I don't think Volpe had a disastrous season with the bat. The average was awful, but he had two terrible streaks. The one that got Dillon Lawson fired and the last month or so of the season, when he seemed to run out of gas. If you think about it, Volpe was maybe the third best hitter on the team! (Behind Judge, Torres.) Of course, that's not saying much for the rest of the team, but it's true. Volpe had a lot of big hits, important hits. Way too many strikeouts and a ridiculous approach at the plate, at times, but still one of the most productive hitters on the team.
At the end of the day - all the award is is a miniature fielder's glove spray painted with a $8 can of Krylon, glued and screwed to a trophy stand and covered in a bell jar.
What's the big deal.
The big deal is that I like using glued and screwed in a sentence.
Makes me smile.
Does it make you smile?
Congrats to Anthony Volpe for the Gold Glove. Now I want him to get his head out of his ass and take much better at bats in 2024.
Watching the World Series, it sure looked like both teams had better defensive shortstops than Volpe. Seager was a human vacuum at SS, he made many extremely difficult plays and he made them look fairly routine. He also showed a true SS caliber arm. I didn't watch Seager play every game during the regular season, of course, but if the World Series was any indication of his play during the 162 games, the gold glove should've been given to Seager.
Sure does, AA. Keep 'em coming!
So if we are going by DWAR, we don't need to have a vote any longer...
And I keep getting DWAR mixed up with GWAR...
https://gwar.net/
Underrated band...
I echo Duque's feelings about what a Gold Glove winner should look like at short, how short Volpe fell compared to that...and how annoyingly arbitrary the whole WAR stat seems, particularly when it comes to fielding—the one aspect of all sports that remains most defiant of meaningful statistical analysis.
Certainly, in the far and recent past, Gold Glove awards have been rife with ridiculous decisions—such as the aforementioned selection of Rafael Palmeiro over Tino, when Palmeiro did not even play 50 games at first.
BUT, that said, it does seem as though Volpe has a credible claim to the award—if only based on other, all-but-incomprehensible stats from baseballreference.
To wit: Volpe's Total Zone Total Fielding Runs Above Average (12); his BIS Defensive Runs Saved Above Average (15); his Total Zone Total Fielding Runs Above Average per 1,200 innings (no, I'm not making these up) (10); and his BIS Defensive Runs Saved Above Average per 1,200 innings (13), all rank well above those of all the other contenders...
...In other words, the mysterious gods of the modern stat world credit Volpe with more runs saved than anybody else.
Partly, that's just because Anthony played more games at short than anybody else, and had many more total chances than ALMOST anyone else. His 157 was much more than the 112 Seagar played there, for instance, and while I would say that, from watching them, Hammer is right and Seagar is certainly a better shortstop, 112 games means you're not even, really, a full-time SS. So give Volpe that.
The one guy who DID have more chances? Houston's Jeremy Pena, who had 576 to Volpe's 560—and also made fewer errors (14 to 17) and turned many more DPs (89 to 63). Why isn't HE the Gold Glove winner.
Damned if I know. But again, where baseballreference puts Volpe at 10-15 runs saved on all those bizarrely named stats, while Pena is only -3 to +7.
Why? Who can say? Maybe Houston's pitchers generated many more ground balls than the Yankees' did. (Though baseballref also has Pena with more range than Volpe).
In the end...it seems like Jeremy Pena got screwed and that is rude (see what I did there, AA?). But fuck that guy. He's on Houston, and they should always get screwed after their awful cheating. So there.
@ AA...if only you could have found a way to slip in the word "tattooed".
I always thought the GG was strictly based on the coaches' and managers' observations. Apparently, no more. I certainly trust the scrutiny of field personnel more than the meaningless stats put out by the analytic nerd. Call me old-fashioned.
I love the MD 20-20 reference. I wonder how many here blanked out or got crazy drunk on that rotgut. It was well-named. Once, after drinking more than a bottle of Mad Dog, I had no recollection of subsequent events. I only remembered being in a Dunkin' Donuts. I don't know what I said to the waitress, only that she slapped my face. I woke up the next morning in my bed. The next day, people said they saw me running through the streets screaming and throwing rocks.
On a related note, I assume that many from the upstate NY area also drank a slightly higher quality rotgut called Widmer Lake Country Niagara white wine. We replaced the water with the chilled wine in a 4-foot bong we constructed from Crystal Rock five-gallon jugs, an industrial rubber stopper and funnel connected to surgical tubing. We thought it enhanced the high.
My analytic is called ETR (patent pending), the Eye Test Result. It showed Volpe to be an average SS and a raw, inadequate hitter.But, like most of us here, I am quite willing to allow such a young player room to grow and improve. I’m looking forward to a better, more rounded performance in ‘24, but any regression or lack of demonstrable improvement next year will raise some very tough questions as to what Volpe’s future is with the team.
Carl, you are a wild & crazy dude!
I have eschewed the drink & the gas. Is it shrewd that I have eschewed being tattooed? Would that I had been wooed by that waitress in the donut shop! Mayhap I'd have been clued in to being rude to Manager Ba-Boone and witnessed him being boo-ed.
@ BTR999, I agree with your ETR on Volpe. I'm very afraid of what we'll see from Volpe next year. Chances are that they'll bring in a guy named Shane Dunlop to be the new hitting coach. He'll preach a slightly new technique, based on Yankee analytics: swing only at a pitch right down the middle and thigh high to belt high. Everything else, just let take it, and hope that the ump calls it a ball. Billions of electronic simulations by computers with the highest processing speeds ever made have confirmed that such an approach will yield at least 2.1016 runs more over the course of the season than any other approach. Hey, that's significant, 572 runs instead of 570 runs! Whooopppppeeeeeeee!
@ Hoss, I did not know that Seager only played 112 games this year. Thanks for that! So that's probably it. Volpe accumulated more credit than Seager, per analytic geek analysis. I think D-WAR is poppycock, not worth the paper they're printing it on, only useful to wipe my ass with. What's that? They don't print anything on paper anymore? It only exists in cyberspace? It's got so bad that you can't even wipe your ass with it anymore.
If I were to rank Volpe on a SS defense scale from 1-100, he would be somewhere b/w 80 and 85. Seager would be up there, maybe 95. The best defensive SS that I saw play would probably be Omar Vizquel, I'd rate him at 99. But memory can be a tricky thing. Maybe he wasn't as good as I remember him. Maybe today's metrics would say that he sucked.
Maybe the Yankees should hire a hitting coached steeped in Ted William's "The Science of Hitting" book/approach. Aw hell, we would need a bunch of Ted Williams clones to understand it!
That's pretty funny, Hammer. And yeah, I'd agree with you: Omar or Ozzie, though of course I saw Omar play much more often.
Also, a guy I always thought was underrated: Bucky Dent. When they got Tommy John, it was a perfect match: Dent, Nettles, and Randolph, with Chambliss scooping up everything at first. With John's groundball pitches, it was like watching a gigantic, human vacuum in action.
Ted Williams' frozen head would be an improvement over an ANALytical batting coach.
Or general manager.
Or manager.
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