Our new book about defense in baseball,
The Fielding Bible, will be out next month, but here's a preview. A new system to evaluate defense has a plus/minus number associated with each player to indicate how many plays he made above or below the number of plays an average fielder would be expected to make.
Here are the outfield leaders for 2005:
| LEFT FIELD | |
| Coco Crisp, Cleveland | +26 |
| Carl Crawford, Tampa Bay | +20 |
| Scott Podsednik, ChiSox | +20 |
| |
| The Worst: Manny Ramirez, Boston | -31 |
| CENTER FIELD | |
| Aaron Rowand, ChiSox | +30 |
| Jeremy Reed, Seattle | +28 |
| Joey Gathright, Tampa Bay | +23 |
| |
| The Worst: Bernie Williams, NYY | -37 |
| RIGHT FIELD | |
| Trot Nixon, Boston | +18 |
| Casey Blake, Cleveland | +14 |
| Geoff Jenkins, Milwaukee | +13 |
| |
| The Worst: Gary Sheffield, NYY | -25 |
The teams with the best overall outfields:
| Atlanta Braves | +50 | (Andruw Jones, Jeff Francoeur, Kelly Johnson, Ryan Langerhans) |
| Chicago White Sox | +46 | (Rowand, Podsednik, Jermaine Dye) |
| Seattle Mariners | +45 | (Reed, Ichiro Suzuki, Raul Ibanez) |
| Cleveland Indians | +44 | (Crisp, Blake, Grady Sizemore) |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | +37 | (Jayson Werth, Jose Cruz Jr., and others) |
| | |
| The Worst: New York Yankees | -95 | (Williams, Sheffield, Hideki Matsui) |
Going into more detail on the system, the left fielder with the highest plus/minus number in 2005 was Cleveland's Coco Crisp with at +26. He made 26 more plays than the average left fielder would have made, given the exact hit locations, the types of batted balls (flyball or line drive), the speed of the batted balls (soft, medium or hard) and the number of bases taken on hits while Crisp was playing left field.