Neyer: Has Rawlings finally fixed the Gold Glove Awards?

From SABR member Rob Neyer at Baseball Nation on August 19, 2013:

Last spring, Rawlings and the Society for American Baseball Researched announced a collaboration: SABR would develop a system to rate fielders, which Rawlings would somehow incorporate into the system used to determine winners of the annual Gold Glove Awards. There weren’t any details, though.

Well, now we’ve got details and they’re encouraging.

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First, there’s no way around this … After many years of criticizing the process — criticizing the managers and the coaches for their collective choices, and criticizing Rawlings for allowing that to happen — I have to give Rawlings a great deal of credit for finally bowing to the obvious and incorporating modern analysis. I do not mean this as a backhanded compliment; I am utterly sincere: Rawlings is doing the right thing, and kudos are deserved.

There are more details here, but essentially SABR has collected seven really smart people and five sophisticated defensive metrics, which is just the way these things should be done. Two or three of the people and one or two of the metrics might be “wrong” about a certain fielder, but the crowd will generally constitute a collective wisdom that arrives at the “right” answer.

Read the full article here: http://www.baseballnation.com/2013/8/19/4637018/gold-glove-awards-voting-system-rawlings-sabr-sabermetrics



Originally published: August 19, 2013. Last Updated: August 19, 2013.