i actually had a dream about the brewers last night, which is pretty cool. what is less cool, is that the dream started with them having a 4-2 lead and ended with them down 5-4. anyhow, in the dream, jj hardy made a couple awesome throws, which got me to thinking...
there was a lot of talk this off-season about moving hardy to third and inserting the slick-fielding alcides escobar at short. now, hardy is a pretty good fielder himself and one of his best attributes is that he almost never bounces a throw. additionally, he tends to throw the ball very hard and very straight every time, never really lolly-gagging one over to first.
we all know that our first baseman is... uh... less-than-awesome as a gloveman, with a particular weakness for scooping throws and moving off the base to collect errant throws. what i'm wondering is if having a fielder of hardy's type-- maybe a tick less range but very accurate arm-- is more valuable to the brewers than one of escobar's type-- a bit more range, but more prone to uncorking errant throws. i'm not sure it's something that could be measured or not, and i'll admit that my assessment of hardy's arm is basically anecdotal, but it's something to look for as the season gets under way later today (hopefully).
1 hour ago
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My assessment of Hardy's arm, and the damage it limits on the other end of his throws, is similar. We're gonna miss him.
My guess is that the range of Escobar makes up for the accuracy of Hardy's arm.
A few years down the road you could probably compare zone ratings and throwing errors to have some idea of the accuracy of that statement.
It's an interesting point. Especially considering that "lack of range" issues tend to result in someone on first, whereas errant throws often result in that player ending up on second.
Lack of range also makes the difference between keeping a ball in the infield and "past a diving Jeter."
I’m just saying that, for the sake of argument, if there was a 1:1 ratio between “balls thrown away by Escobar due to defensively inept first baseman over what J.J. Hardy would have thrown away” and “balls not fielded by J.J. Hardy that would have been fielded by Escobar,” that Hardy’s mistakes would be less damaging. If a ball “gets by a diving Jeter,” it’s not any worse than “And Jeter airmails it over Texiera and into the 3rd row.” In fact, it’s quite a bit better.
so, i think there's actually a fielding stats source that keeps track of "type" of mistakes made by fielders. they have like 27 types of mistakes, like "bobbled ball", "threw it in the dirt", etc.
i'd be interested to see a breakdown of the brewers generally-- like how few bad throws does fielder actually save compared to a normal firstbaseman, and is my intuition correct that hardy makes fewer bad throws than an average ss.
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