MVN - Most Valuable Network

McDonald Under the Microscope

• Update: It’s official, John McDonald has signed a two-year, 3.8 million dollar deal. Read his comments on his new contract in the Toronto Star here.

Rumour has it that the Prime Minister of Defense is about to be re-signed to a two year deal worth in the vicinity of two million dollars a season. There’s no question that John Mcdonald is fun to watch, but is he really the best? This year he has been referred to frequently as the best fielding shortstop in the league, and makes regular appearances on Sportscentre with jaw-dropping plays.

But looks can be deceiving, and being flashy doesn’t win games. Derek Jeter’s signature jump-throw is impressive, a regular on ESPN, and has won him the last three gold gloves. But as baseball analysts have been moaning for years now, he is not a good defensive shortstop (in fact the debate ranges from below average to one of the worst ever).

The only statistic regularly quoted by major outlets to support Mac’s claim is fielding percentage, where Mac ranks at the top of the league (.985). Unfortunately it’s a pretty terrible statistic that at best provides an incomplete picture. It’s not just that players who go for more balls make more errors, but that there are a lot of plays that would not be called an error if they are missed, but good fielders make a reasonable percentage of the time. If a player can make those marginal plays at a significant rate, it can easily overshadow being a little less sure handed, which is all that fielding percentage measures.

And so we come to the realm of a fielder’s ‘range’. Unfortunately, it’s a really hard ability to quantify, and defensive stats are tricky to understand and still very much in development- nothing is as black and white as offensive numbers and the best defensive metrics try to take into account all the shades of grey. Here’s a wrap-up of some of the stats out they’re, how they work, and what they say about John Mcdonald’s defence.

1) Range Factor

This is the least complicated range statistic; it is simply a count of how many times a fielder touches the ball to make an out per game. Add up all a player’s assists (balls thrown to make an out) and putouts (balls caught to make an out - fly balls as well as tagging a runner, taking a throw from the 2b, etc) and divide by nine.

Mcdonald’s Range Factor is 5.03. That is .51 above the major league average, and 14 points better than the next best player in the AL, Juan Uribe. That would suggest that Mac makes 0.5 additional plays per game more than an average fielder, which is pretty amazing (for example- a hitter who gets an additional 0.5 hits a game hits about 100 points higher than an average hitter).

But there are problems with range factor. It’s based entirely on quantity, so you can’t tell if a player is making more outs because he is superior at getting to balls, or if his team just has a lot of balls hit to his position. The Blue Jays’ pitching staff leads the majors in ground balls, so it’s totally possible that Mac’s superior range factor is a result of that.

Also, a lot of cheap outs are given just as much weight as tough plays. A infield pop up or taking the ball from the second baseman for a force out doesn’t have a lot to do with range, but it has just as much value to RF.

2) Zone Rating

This is the best publicly available fielding stat. What it does is break down the field into a number of zones, and then STATS employees manually determine which zone each ball was hit into. For infielders, pop-ups and line drives are not counted, and starting a double play is considered the same as a normal play.

A zone rating is then the percentage of balls that a player fielded that went into one of his assigned zones. A zone is defined as belonging to a fielder if an average fielder makes plays in that zone more than 50% of the time. So it’s different from fielding percentage in that it’s not a percentage of how many routine plays a fielder made, but rather a percentage of how many balls a fielder caught that he had a reasonable chance to make it to.

Revised Zone Rating (Balls “Out Of Zone”)

Even better is the “revised” version of Zone Rating from the Hardball Times, which has one major benefit over the “old” Zone Rating- it considers plays that a fielder makes on a ball OUT of his zone separately. The normal zone rating just gives the fielder a bonus, and it ends up not giving enough credit for spectacular plays.

Revised ZR also gives us a more complete picture of a fielder. Is he just highly efficient on plays that a normal fielder could make, or does he regularly track down balls that he had no business getting to?

The first thing that the Zone numbers tell us about McDonald is that he hasn’t had a lot more balls hit to him because of the Blue Jays pitching staff. 203 balls were hit into Mac’s zone. If he had played an average number of innings for a qualifying SS (and from now on all the numbers that I refer to for him will be for this average (1080) number of innings), he would have had 319 balls hit into his zone, which is 10 fewer than the major league average.

However, he did convert them at a much higher rate. McDonald’s Revised zone rating is .842. That is the best in the AL, and .026 higher than the major league average. With 319 balls hit his way, that translates to another 8.3 ground balls caught being made over an average fielder.

Don’t forget the balls “out of zone”. McDonald would have 66, which is 24 more than the major league average, and again the best in the AL. This shows that while he’s one of the best at balls that a normal SS might get to, where he really shines is making plays that he had no business getting to. You already knew that? Well, ok…but now you can back it up with some hard numbers and know that your eyes do not deceive you – he’s not just being flashy, Mac really does get to grounders that nobody else can.

The Gold Glove(s)

Throughout this article I have compared Mac’s offence to the major league average and the best fielders in the American League. But there is a better defensive player in the Majors, and it’s not even close. I hesitate to mention his name while Ricky Romero is still getting shelled in AA, but it is Troy Tulowitzki. In fact, he’s almost as far ahead of Mcdonald in RF (5.50), and RZR (.862/78 OOZ) as Mac is ahead of the rest of the league. And he can hit- if he doesn’t become the first rookie to win a Gold Glove, it will be almost as big a travesty as, well, if Derek Jeter wins another one.

But in the American League, the numbers agree that John Mcdonald would is the best SS in the league, with the Royals’ Tony Pena a close second. Of course that has very little to do with winning a Gold Glove because Mac can’t hit his weight, which is a significant factor for being recognized. Does anyone else wish that the Gold Glove was really just about the best fielders in the league?

Final Thoughts

On the negative side, it’s not fair to just extrapolate his season over a period twice as long as I’ve done. Mac gets tired- as he did last season when he wound up with 14 errors after being solid all season. This is pure speculation, but when I thought of looking at his numbers, his Range Factor was up at 5.2, when I started writing this article it had fallen to at 5.1 and now it’s 5.03. It could be just fluctuation but I wonder if Mcdonald’s glove is getting tired out there- he also made an uncharacteristic error to begin the Accardo’s recent save.

On the bright side, ZR doesn’t get credit for his ability to turn the DP with ZR, catch line drives, or smart plays like cutting off a ball under the perfect circumstances. I don’t want to get into “clutch fielding” here, but Mac knows every trick in the book; he throws behind runners and doesn’t make mental mistakes.

Next week….the link to runs – and does a Gold Glove make Johnny Mac a starter?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.