Show me a stat that says Lowell isn’t as good a fielder as he was, I won’t deny it.
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2008: +15.6
2009: -17.2

I had no idea that Lowell had declined in the field to that extent. So you’re right about that.

As far as Ellsbury being a poor fielder, I’m not making that claim, the guys that came up with UZR are. They’re using data provided to them by Baseball Info Solutions which publishes “The Fielding Bible” by John Dewan and the Bill James books. I can see this bothers you a lot but I guess I’d probably give these guys the benefit of the doubt.

Wrong again.

Show me a stat that says Lowell isn’t as good a fielder as he was, I won’t deny it.

But it is the height of insanity to claim that Ellsbury is a poor fielder. He gets to everything. He’s caught every thing he’s reached but one in his major league career. He is not a poor fielder by any possible stretch of the imagination.

@ OnceIWasAYankeeFan:
Hear ye, hear ye: Any stat that doesn’t fluff a member of the Red Sox is hereby shunned.

I’m not going to waste my time with a metric that concludes that Ellsbury is also a poor outfielder. No one can rationally say that, so …

Basestealing success has nothing to do with it. Speed only helps to correct other shortcomings but outfield defense is based on taking good routes to the ball and reading the ball off the bat as much (or moreso) than anything else. To illustrate that point, Chone Figgins is a career -6.4 UZR/150 in the outfield. You’d have to agree that Figgins has been one of the best basestealers and certainly one of the fastest players in baseball. If speed were the only requirement for outfield defense then baseball would be a much easier game.

When you say “[t]ell me M.J., did your eyes tell you that Bay is a crappy fielder, or did you go looking for stats to support your general view that he isn’t really very good?” my response is simply that I didn’t have to go looking for stats to support my hypothesis. I didn’t go into the conversation looking for stats because I had no opinion on Bay as a defensive player. That I found stats doesn’t mean I’m suffering from confirmation bias here.

I won’t pretend to say that I watch Bay in the field as often as you do. But just because you watch him every night doesn’t mean that the metrics are necessarily wrong.

At the end of the day, I don’t care about this subject nearly as much as you do. I can certainly understand your POV here: something disparaging has been said about one of your favorite hometown players and you’re trying to defend him.

I guess all I can say is that you might want to talk to the folks that came up with UZR/150 and have them explain why their metric is valid and why Jason Bay grades out so poorly in LF over the past three years. Your eyes are telling you something different but, to me, you sounds a lot like Yankee fans did (myself included) back in 2002 when Rob Neyer first said Derek Jeter was a crappy defensive SS. It took some time to accept it but then you start to see what people are talking about.

I understand that these are the guys ranked worse, but when they are the ones in your neighborhood, its obvious that statistic doesn’t see a lot of difference between Bay and the rest – unless you can tell me that Bay is closer to some other, not so unanimously bad outfielders than he is to Manny, Dunn, Ibanez and Burrell.

This measure is basically supposed to be “range” right? Well here’s one reason I’d suggest its wrong: Bay is a good baserunner with not only excellent success at stealing bases (46 SB, 4 CS in the last four years), but has stolen more bases in the last four years than all four of those other guys combined. Is baserunning a proxy for skill in the outfield? Certainly means you have a little bit of speed, right? Stands to reason that your range shouldn’t be so awful as to be lumped in with living statues like Manny.

What my eyes tell me is that Bay makes the plays you expect him to, and he surely is not the adventure-in-fielding, or even remotely close to it, that Manny or Dunn or Burrell are.

Tell me M.J., did your eyes tell you that Bay is a crappy fielder, or did you go looking for stats to support your general view that he isn’t really very good?

OnceIWasAYankeeFan wrote:

Obviously you’ve paid no attention. Bay said from the moment he arrived that he can’t equal Manny and would be foolish to try, he’s going to do his best to play as well as he can. Replacing Manny didn’t put a chip on his shoulder. But replacing him in the lineup certainly creates more pressure than he had dealt with in the past.

theres no way i can answer you without causing steve to put up a community standards comment. Just know that, since he knew that he couldn’t be as good as manny and everyone else did too (as you’ve agreed), that there couldn’t possibly have been the same pressure.

side note: per Pete Abe, veras was traded to the indians for cash (aka sold)
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In reading the comments on a Cleveland website, a lot of commenters there hate GM Mark Shapiro as much as Steve hates Brian Cashman. Everyone’s a critic…

Anyone with eyesight can see that he is far better than those you named.
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FWIW, he IS better than the ones I named. Those three were all rated worse than Bay. Just saying this so you don’t think I said Bay is worse than them. According to FanGraphs UZR/150 leaderboard for the past three years, Bay is the 4th worst LF in baseball

any statistic that says he is Dunn/Manny/Burrell levels of bad in the outfield is obviously badly flawed. Anyone with eyesight can see that he is far better than those you named.
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I don’t know what to tell you here. People a lot smarter than either of us seem to think this is a pretty good defensive metric.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve used the same defense you’re using here — my eyes tell me something the stats don’t — but, given the names on that list, it seems to me that the list may be onto something. Dunn, Manny, Burrell and Ibanez (the name right after Bay) all do suck in the field. Why would Bay be the only name that doesn’t belong?