Statcast's Role Of Defense In Major League Baseball

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Introduction Statistics and data analytics are an important part of Major League Baseball, with its significance increasing over recent years. Baseball is a very luck dependent sport, so determining a player's abilities can be difficult. Early statisticians attempted to calculate a player's ability through the use of basic metrics, which had too much variance due to luck. As a result, they were largely ignored in favor of scouts' opinions and biases. In the 1970s, a group of statisticians and analysts co-founded the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and started creating formulas for advanced metrics that correlated better with winning. The accuracy of these new metrics slowly allowed the baseball community to accept them as a valid …show more content…

Prior to the introduction of statcast, defense was a poorly understood part of baseball because it relied on human judgment rather than any objective metrics. It is known that “defense performance” has been historically measured by errors and fielding percentage. An error, by definition, is failing to get an out on a routinely batted ball that is expected to result in an out. However, this requires a scorer’s judgement and brings in human error, as well as it does not account for ‘bad defense’ if a player got a slow jump on a ball and did not make the play—this is technically not an error” (Mizels, Erickson, Chalmers). Statcast provides the opportunity to analyze a player’s fielding ability more accurately, by applying measurable data to the conversation. Using positional data recorded by Statcast, teams now understand how quickly a player reacts to a ball in play, how much ground the player must cover to make the play, and the chance the player can make that play based on the league average. These metrics are also being turned into new defensive statistics so that teams and fans can compare players across the league. “Using advanced technologies, like Statcast, new defensive sabermetrics have been developed to improve defensive metrics” (Mizels, Erickson, Chalmers). One of the more widely known stats is Outs Above Average, which is a range-based metric that shows how many outs a player has saved over other players at the same position. Being able to compare athletes to the league-wide average has greatly impacted teams that prioritize defensive metrics, so they can make better decisions. This also helps many defensive players who went unrecognized by traditional stats as now they are recognized for their talent and see that reflected in their

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