Looking Beyond the Gold Gloves

At the end of every season, we see the annual awards handed out, with the least debated coming first: the Rawlings Gold Glove Awards. Many might like to argue over whether each MVP winner or Cy Young Award recipient was the most deserving, but not much thought seems to go into the Gold Glove selections. Maybe it’s because we are too trusting of defensive abilities of the same players that are selected year in and year out. The idea has been thrown out that the Gold Glove awards are more of a name recognition award, and certain players have been able to settle into the award for their position and accumulate a respective amount over the course of their career. In this article, I would like to explore some of the Gold Glove award winners at the Shortstop position, and share my thoughts towards whether or not we can really view them as great defensive shortstops.

Shortstop is the second toughest defensive position to play (catcher is first). The following is a list of the shortstops who have won the Gold Glove the most amount of times in their career: Ozzie Smith (13), Omar Vizquel (11), Luis Aparicio (9), Mark Belanger (8), Dave Concepcion (5), Tony Fernandez and Alan Trammell (4), Derek Jeter (3). Although there are others who won 3 in their career, the reason I only listed Derek Jeter from that group is because I would like to examine his defensive ability as a shortstop. Indeed, Derek Jeter is a great all-around shortstop, but his offensive numbers carry most of the weight. At first glance, he has a career fielding percentage of .976 which is close to Ozzie Smith’s career .978. We will focus more on the Wizard later. As for now, I will say that looking at someone’s fielding percentage is probably the last stat you should look at to determine their worth as a defender. For example, it in no way punishes an infielder for lacking range. We will get to this idea in a bit. From 2004 to 2008, Derek Jeter ranked ninth, ninth, eleventh, sixteenth, and seventh in fielding percentage among all shortstops who qualified. Now these ranks aren’t anything to write home about, but what I am about to reveal to you is. Keep in mind that Derek Jeter won the Gold Glove for American League Shortstops from 2004 to 2006. I would now like to introduce a defensive stat I found on the Hardball Times website known as OOZ. OOZ stands for Out of Zone and as defined by the site is the total number of outs made by a fielder on balls hit outside his zone. From 2004 to 2008, Derek Jeter had OOZ totals of 29, 26, 28, 35, and 29. This might not mean anything to you yet, but to give you an idea, the league leaders in OOZ from 2004 to 2008 were Miguel Tejada (93), Rafael Furcal and Adam Everett (78), Bill Hall (66), Troy Tulowitzki (87), and JJ Hardy (72). In fact, in the years that he won 3 Gold Glove Awards in a row, Derek Jeter ranked 22/22, 25/25, and 23/24 among all shortstops who qualified for fielding percentage in those years. So it might be safe to say that Jeter was handed his 3 Gold Glove Awards on a name recognition basis based on him finishing last twice and second to last in this very important range statistic. I’m certain that one cannot be viewed as a great defensive shortstop with contributing the range factor.

I would now like to shift gears back to the list of the top Gold Glove winners at the shortstop position. Based on this award, the top two defensive shortstops of all-time are Ozzie Smith and Omar Vizquel. Many would agree with these two being the best defensive shortstops of all-time, but is that really the case? The answer is partially. Over his career, Ozzie Smith posted a fielding percentage of .978. Omar Vizquel up to this point has one of .986. Smith’s best defensive season based on fielding percentage (.987), would only rank tenth among Omar Vizquel’s best defensive seasons based on fielding percentage (His best was .998 and he is fielding 1.000 up to this point of the season while seeing limited time for the Texas Rangers). However, this by no means indicates that Vizquel is a better defensive shortstop than Smith, and his fielding percentages are so misleading that he has wrongly been assessed as a quality defensive shortstop over his career. For this argument, I would like to examine the stat FRAA, which stands for fielding runs above average and can be found on the Baseball Prospectus website. One can basically look at FRAA as the amount of runs a defender saves his team in the field in comparison to what an average shortstop would have saved if he was playing in that spot instead. Here is a look at the year by year FRAA totals for Smith and Vizquel:

Smith (1978-1996): 10, 4, 18, 14, 26, 24, 25, 51, 13, 18, 30, 39, 14, 22, 39, 24, 2, 0, 14

Vizquel (1989-2009): 10, -11, 1, -15, -11, -2, -6, 3, 5, 5, 22, -12, -5, -27, 3, -7, -3, -16, 9, -2, 6

It is pretty much common knowledge that Ozzie Smith is the greatest defensive shortstop of all-time and the numbers back this up. He won the Gold Glove Award for NL shortstops 13 years in a row (1980-1992). During these 13 years, he saved the Cardinals 333 runs above the average shortstop through his amazing defense. Every one of those years, he fielded well above the average in terms of FRAA, and much can be attributed to his ability to range to balls up the middle that no one else could. Omar Vizquel won the AL Gold Glove Award for shortstops 9 years in a row (1993-01) and then twice in the NL (2005-06). During his 11 seasons in which he claimed the Gold Glove Award, he actually saved his teams 20 runs less than an average shortstop would have (meaning that he actually cost them 20). I’m not sure that this should be a true attribute of an 11 time Gold Glove Award Winner. Vizquels best season of FRAA would rank tied for 9th in comparison to Smith’s best seasons of FRAA. In the end, Ozzie Smith saved the Cards 387 runs more than the average shortstop would have in a 19 year career, and Vizquel has cost his teams 53 more runs than an average shortstop would up to this point in his career. What this means in the end is that between the two leading Gold Glove Award winners at the shortstop position, Ozzie Smith saved his team 440 more runs in FRAA than Vizquel has.

As shown above, fielding percentages are terrible determinants of a players overall defensive ability. They have been very misleading when it has come to evaluating a player’s defensive ability and have probably cost more deserving players their shot at winning Gold Glove Awards. At the high level of play that is Major League Baseball, we should come to expect that a player should successfully field a ground ball within his range well over 9.5 out of every 10 chances, but it is those that make the plays outside of their zone that really set them apart.