Quote:
Originally Posted by jswest18
Not really. A player that has better range at SS will have more opportunities every game to make a play. A player that has elite range and great hands will actually make more plays than a SS with average range over the course of a game and the course of his career. Now, in a sense you are right about things averaging out. For an individual game a SS could have an obsurd amount of balls hit right them. The next game they could have none hit to them. That doesn't tell you anything about the SS' range. But over the course of a decade or two decades then those things average out and you get a good idea of the range of any given SS. That is one of the big separators between Ozzie and Omar. Ozzie had one of the greatest ranges as a SS in the history of the game. He got to balls and made plays on those balls regularly that Omar never could.
I do agree that all of the shifting taking place now has to do damage to this metric.
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If Smith is far and away the best SS ever (I'm not saying otherwise), then wouldn't his range be far and away better than anyone else's if this stat really means anything?
From what I see, the best single season marks are from the dead-ball era which is no surprise. And then the guys who are career all-time leaders are from an era when there were far less strikeouts and home runs compared to when Omar played. This stat cannot be taken at face value, whereas something like fielding percentage can be. To properly evaluate a true defensive range, it requires digging way deep into so much more than just saying putouts plus assists divided by innings played.