Question about Bill Hall's defense

by cwyers on May 14, 2008 12:23 PM CDT Comment 11 comments

This is probably a moot point right now - seeing as Hall is no longer an outfielder - but I was doing some graphing this morning and I had a question.

Here's a graph of Bill Hall in the outfield last year:

Compared to, say, Jim Edmonds:

Color-coding indicates frequency of plays made at that location - blue means a lot of plays, red means fewer plays.

(If you're curious - I'm looking at Edmonds for obvious reasons; Hall had similar RZR/OOZ numbers in a similar amount of opportunities and so I thought it might be an interesting one-on-one comparison.)

The larger number of blue "clusters" in the Hall graph indicates (to me, at least) a larger number of starting positions for Hall than Edmonds. Does that match up well with your experience watching Hall last season?

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I am nearly certain you are correct

The Brewers really move their defenders around a lot from batter to batter. If you rerun your analysis with a lefty/righty split I am sure you will see a huge difference. Also, when Hall started the year he appeared to play deeper than normal which is no real surprise. If you also run the numbers pre and post ASB you probably will see a big difference.

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by dixieflatline on May 14, 2008 12:33 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

are those raw totals

as opposed to say “plays per opportunity”

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by jacob on May 14, 2008 12:39 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Should really clarify that point.

This is a graph of all fly balls fielded by that outfielder, where they were fielded – regardless of whether or not they were successful in recording an out. What we’re looking at/for here is a measure of an outfielder’s positioning, and possibly his range – not his overall quality. You could build a zone rating type of metric out of this sort of data, but that’s not what I’ve done here.

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by cwyers on May 14, 2008 2:29 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

ok.

so the shape and intensity of the plot is directly related to the total number of balls fielded. you say edmons and hall fielded a similar number of balls in ‘07? can that be right given that edmonds only played 103 games in CF last year? what do the charts for the great CFs look like?

i agree with dixie about hall’s positioning, he definitely started out playing very deep and eventually was playing quite a bit shallower, also the left-right outfield shifts are dramatic for the brewers.

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by jacob on May 14, 2008 3:40 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

I tend to think Im somewhat smart

but these graphs seem to stump me.

by brewfan2 on May 14, 2008 1:10 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

The blue spots are where an outfielder makes most of his plays at.

In Edmonds’ case last season, he tended to make most of his plays in one location – presumably the location where he started off at most of the time. Hall had a lot of small blue clusters, which says (to me) that he was shifting his position more frequently than Edmonds. I’ll do what dixieflatline suggested later and break it down by lefty/righty batter and pre/post ASB and see what that does.

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by cwyers on May 14, 2008 2:32 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

You should make a color gradient for a key

He's extremely quick and good.

by battlekow on May 14, 2008 3:22 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

I'd really like to get a different color scheme altogether...

...as I don’t think the red/blue spectrum is all that intuitive. But it stands out against the white better than the alternatives I’ve worked with so far. It’s something I’m working on.

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by cwyers on May 14, 2008 3:37 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

what about

just red-orange-yellow, for high-medium-low? that’s a bit more intuitive sticking with one “family” of colors, and using saturation to show frequency.

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by jacob on May 14, 2008 3:41 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

edmonds

questionable Left-Center range according to this article. seems to corroborate the graph (sort of).

http://www.suntimes.com/sports/948313,CST-SPT-deluca14.article

Early scouting reports indicated the man who had a strained calf much worse than the one that put Alfonso Soriano on the shelf for two weeks had no range left in center.

Is edmonds calf injury his right leg? that would make sense since it’s the first push-off you make going to left-center from right field.

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by jacob on May 14, 2008 3:45 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

yeah it's his right leg.

mentioned later in the article (poor style!).

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by jacob on May 14, 2008 3:47 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

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