if he said “I think he does an pretty good job out there, and we needed his lefty bat in the lineup”

But to say “plus” means better than the average, when he’s actually one of the worst.

ooooooh, burn

/rec-fish

and I didn’t say the word “idiot” now did I?

I also wouldn’t have made the judgement as to his fielding ability if I saw his numbers were up-down-up-down-up. He isn’t aging gracefully. Before 2011, he last played CF in 2009 and he was pretty bad that season in center and right. Here are his overall OF numbers from 2004 on
year UZR UZR/150
2004 -3.6 -11.3
2005 10.6 39.3
2006 7.8 31.7
2007 3.8 21.2
2008 2.9 18.1
2009 2.7 18.3
2010 0.3 9.0
2011 -0.6 -3.0

That’s a decrease in UZR every year from his 2nd year peak, and other than a virtual level in 08-09, a decrease in UZR/150 every year. Clearly there’s a trend. If someone’s overall OF numbers are declining like that, and are now negative, CF is the last place on the baseball diamond (or at least in the OF) that you should place him. Basically, I would surmise that as he is aging, his range is decreasing dramatically and range/speed is the primary factor that you look in for your centerfielder.

I used UZR/150 as a proxy so the number of innings played doesn’t make it look like he sucks less than he does – if he was given the opportunity to play more, he would likely provide additional negative value to the team (especially in contrast to what Morgan can provide). It also is sometimes sufficient to see a trend over 150 innings, even if the result does not pass statistical significance (which I’m assuming is arbitrary assigned to be p < .05). I’d hazard the guess that 150 innings, or even 103, is enough to have a p < .4, which for a single player I would argue is most of the time significant. If you’re just going off the measure of correlation, UZR has been shown to be positively correlated in one year, two year, or three year intervals. Yes, the degree of correlation goes up when comparing 3+ year chunks, but the damned numbers are still positively correlated from year to year and thus predictive. I’d imagine that smaller chunks within a year would also be found to be positively correlated, but to a lower extent. Saying that you can’t compare without 3+ years of data is a cop-out. If you want to go that route, compare 2009-2011 to 2008-2010 or 2006-2008. He’s getting worse every year and isn’t as solid of an outfielder/centerfielder as Morgan is by UZR data. Morgan in turn pales in comparison with Gomez.

And further, why is Hairston bumping Morgan out of CF to LF (as happened today)? Morgan has had positive numbers in every season at CF and ever field ever EXCEPT LF this year. I’d agree that the sample size is not significant enough to conclude that Morgan is bad in left, but he’s clearly not as good in left as he has been in right or center, either now or over his career. Hairston has had positive value throughout his career in left, with the exception of a year in which he only played two game-equivalents there.

Perhaps before you give the snarky/witty retort implying that I don’t know what the f*ck I’m talking about (and rec-fishing), perhaps you should look at the numbers yourself or should trust that I might have done a little quick research before I posted a fanshot, but didn’t feel like typing up a fanpost with detailed analysis to tell me what my eyeballs told me with a quick scan of the data. Also, RR was probably given a scouting report on Hairston for this season, probably watched some video of him from this season, so I was pointing out that the numbers say the opposite of what RR’s eyeballs told him or RR is being a bit too much of a “player’s manager” by inventing deluded qualifications for players.