Amid all the chatter on the Giants' catching situation, regular reader and commenter Walter Guest weighs in with the following column. To get the juiciness flowing, here's the nut of Walter's argument:
The benefits of Sandoval catching are so obvious to me that I'm surprised there is any discussion.
Oh, but discussion there will be. Let Walter know what you think in the comments.
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Sandoval Catching?
I once thought I was gifted at analyzing statistics. Then Bill James came along and made me realize I was a plodder. No one outside the game has influenced baseball as much as Bill James. I had all his abstracts and other books but left them behind when I moved here to Thailand. He wrote in one of them that the average tabletop baseball gamer would be better at making out a lineup than the average major league manager. One reason would be that the average gamer has done it so many more times than the average manager.
I will confess that I have played over 20,000 tabletop baseball games, almost all solitaire. That would make me out to be an ultra-nerd except I played in tents and mud huts on Pacific islands, in Peru and Iran and places like that. I once got evicted from a mud hut outside Da Nang because the dice annoyed my roommates. Far away places sound exciting but can be pretty boring when you get there. I had my distractions, some others had theirs.
All that playing only makes me an expert at certain tabletop games, little more than that. But it has given me some insight and instinctual knowledge of the relative value of players in positions on the field. Which brings me to Sandoval and the catching position. The benefits of Sandoval catching are so obvious to me that I'm surprised there is any discussion. The Giants have a potential Hall of Fame catcher on the team right now and most people are objecting to his catching. I wonder if they would have wanted Roy Campanella to play third base. He probably could have played it just as well as Sandoval did and it would have made him stronger in September. If Giant management is thinking the same way, then that will be the end of Sabean because that will probably be the difference between a winning and a losing season.
Here is the defensive spectrum from the Bill James Primer:
[ - - 1B - LF - RF - 3B - CF - 2B - SS - C - - ]
The basic premise is that positions at the right end of the spectrum are more difficult than the positions at the left end of the spectrum. Smart teams keep good hitters as far right on that spectrum as they can go, often keeping them there too long. As defensive skills deteriorate, they move to the left.
Hitting ability is usually the reverse of fielding skills; meaning that the more skilled fielding positions usually have the weakest hitters. Using weighted on base average (wOBA), which is as good as anything else, here is how the National League (fifteen teams, not including the Giants) and the Giants performed this year:
NL AVG SFG
Catcher 313 295
Shortstop 318 288
Second base 330 268
Center field 336 333
Third base 325 375
Right field 343 304
Left field 344 326
First base 370 317
Note that the Giants had only one position above the average of the other 15 teams.
Sandoval had a wOBA this year of 396. Bill James projects him to 399 next year but I'll use the 396 of this year and compare him to the composite wOBAs of this year, assuming they will be similar next year.
At first base he gives the Giants a 7% advantage.
At third base he gives the Giants a 22% advantage.
At catcher he gives the Giants a 27% advantage.
So if they move him to first base, which is not only silly but likely, the Giants will be giving up almost all the advantage he earns for them. On third base he gives up some of that 22% with slightly below average fielding. Putting him into catch will wind up giving the Giants far more than that 27%. It will mean that someone like Torrealba will not be catching and his bat will be replaced by, hopefully, a league average third baseman.
- walterguest at yahoo dot com
