It is late-August, so it must be time for the Angel PR machine to start its annual push to secure a Gold Glove win for at least one of their players. Their media blitz has successfully helped several Angels win top fielder honors in recent years. Torii Hunter (2008), Orlando Cabrera (2007), Darin Erstad (2004, 2002 & 2000) and Bengie Molina (2003 & 2002) are some of the most recent examples of that success. This year, the Angels have self-nominated Chone Figgins and Erick Aybar for Gold Glove honors, but the question is do either of them deserve it?
If you just judge each player using your eyeballs, it would certainly seem that both Figgy and Aybar are more than deserving of at least some Gold Glove votes, but do the statistics really back them up? Let’s take a look because I think you might be surprised.
For the last three years, Chone Figgins has been almost exclusively the Angels’ starting third baseman instead of bouncing all over the field as the Angels’ utilityman extraordinaire. Letting Figgy finally stay in one place has done him well as he has steadily developed into an excellent fielder at the hot corner. He couldn’t possibly look less like a prototypical third baseman at 5’8″ and 180 pounds. Compare him to a guy like Scott Rolen who checks in at 6/4″, 250 lbs. and Figgy looks like he should be playing in the Little League World Series. However, it could well be that Chone is the best fielding third baseman in the American League. Figgy possesses the third-best Ultimate Zone Rating (9.6) at his position in the AL, second-best Range Factor (2.91) and fourth-best Revised Zone Rating (.748) but couples that with by far the most Out-Of-Zone plays (69) of any three-bagger in the league. All these different stats indicate different things about a player’s fielding prowess, but the sheer fact that Figgy is so close to the top in all of them certainly suggests that he should at least be in the conversation for the Gold Glove.
If there is one problem with Figgins’ campaign it is that he is tied for second in errors at 12, putting him just fifth in fielding percentage. That will likely blemish his record just enough so that he gets passed over in favor of a guy like Evan Longoria who has a vastly superior reputation and comparable stats. The real kicker in Figgy’s campaign though should be just how many Out-Of-Zone plays he makes versus his contemporaries. That more than anything shows just how many great plays Figgins makes on a regular basis. It probably won’t be enough to impress the notoriously sabermetric-averse Gold Glove voters, but it should at least put Figgins in the running.
Figgins might be the Gold Glove choice for all the stat-heads out there, but Erick Aybar is going to have to garner votes through some other means. He is sixth (out of eight) in Revised Zone Rating (.811) and sixth in Ultimate Zone Rating (0.0, in other words, the very definition of average). The Bill James disciples aren’t even going to think about voting for Aybar. However, his campaign isn’t totally absurd. Aybar is third in the league in Range Factor (4.49) and he has made just seven errors all season long, good for the third best fielding percentage amongst AL shortstops.
The problem is that the stats suggest that Aybar is great at making the routine plays, but not so good at making plays that only the best shortstops make. Of course, anyone who has watched Aybar play probably can remember at least a dozen spectacular catches or double play turns that Aybar has seemingly pulled out of thin air. So, if Aybar is going to take home the gold this season, the Angel PR department is going to have to slap together an exciting highlight reel to make it happen because the stats just don’t back up their assertions.
Just to put all this statistical talk in perspective (or maybe just to confuse the matter even more), let’s take a look at the case of Kendry Morales. Now, we can all agree that K-Mo has improved mightily with the glove from his previous seasons with the Angels, but he has a long way to go to be considered a Gold Glove caliber fielder. Well, it turns out Kendry might have the best statistical credentials on the entire team. Kendry is third in both Revised Zone Rating, Out-Of-Zone plays and Range Factor. But that’s not all, Morales has THE BEST Ultimate Zone Rating (generally considered the best all-encompassing fielding stat) of AL first baseman. I guess the message here is that the stats and real world perceptions don’t always match up, so take this whole exercise with a grain of salt.
The real kicker in this is that the Gold Glove Award voting is generally a farce since the voting is done by the MLB managers and coaches who almost always vote by reputation and/or basic popularity (which is how Derek Jeter has multiple Gold Gloves despite negative range at shortstop). All those grumpy old men coaches are practically allergic to looking at any fielding stat beyond total errors or fielding percentage, even though they are terribly misleading. Maybe that is why the Angel PR department puts so much effort into selling people on their players’ Gold Glove credentials
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