It’s always (well, since a few minutes ago) seemed dumb to me to vote on the Gold Glove awards the way we have, so I devised an only slightly different system to give us better results. Not very sabermetric, but just applying a little numerical common sense.
The really dumb part, which hasn’t actually been in force since Bill Clinton’s second term, used to be to give out three awards for outfield defense to the three best centerfielders in a league rather than one award apiece to the best centerfielder, rightfielder and leftfielder, presumably on the basis of being unable to locate a halfway-decent fielding LFer. After all, if he was halfway decent, why would he be in LF? As late as 1998, we had three fulltime CFers get the GG awards for "best three outfielders." (I get Edmonds, Griffey, and Lofton in 1998 as the last all-CF GG squad, but maybe I missed someone. Maddox, Geromino, and Cedeno in 1976 is the last NL one I could find. Gerald Ford was President then. Or maybe Millard Fillmore.) Anyway, we’ve stopped doing that really stupid stuff, but fielding awards still seem poorly thought out to me.
My chief quarrel is quantitative. Let me illustrate using my all-time favorite fallacy of argumentation, the always popular reductio ad absurdum: if a Willie Mays or Andrew Jones or Jackie Bradley Jr. one year, at the top of his defensive game, played his usual spectacular centerfield through April but then suffered a season-ending injury, would you still vote for him as that season’s GG CFer? Maybe you would, if you had your brains scooped out and placed in the jar labelled "Deviant Brain Sample," but to me, it’s too obvious even to ask. Of course you wouldn’t. Yes Willie Jones Jr. is still the league’s best CFer, presumably, but HE DIDN’T ACTUALLY PLAY CENTERFIELD IN THE SEASON IN QUESTION, so he’s ineligible for the award. OK, now getting reductioed only a little less absurdly, how about if he got injured in June or in August? There needs to be some minimum of innings in CF before you’re eligible for the award, but too often the GG is won by the guy with a reputation, rather than by the guy who actually had a killer year fielding. I wonder which of Brooks Robinson’s 16 consecutive GGs actually represent an off-year defensively—God knows BRobby had a few offensive off-years mixed in there. Nothing to be ashamed of, but we don’t give him the MVP in 1963 just because he had a terrific batting year in 1962 and would again in 1964, do we? What are the odds that every season, he was actually the best fielding 3bman in the AL, or that Mays really out-fielded Curt Flood, Vada Pinson, Bill Virdon, and Richie Ashburn for 12 straight seasons? You’ve gotta figure that there were a couple of "Lifetime Achievement Awards" mixed in there.
So what I’d suggest is simply listing the league’s CFers on the ballot in order of innings at that position, and asking voters to move them up or down, for reasons of their own. A voter could, if he wanted to, move Willie Jones Jr. from 28th place to 1st place, but would have to fill in the mandatory space marked "Reason." Without a reason, the player remains in the slot he’s in. If you really want to argue that Jones accomplished more defensively for his team in his 35 innings in CF than the guy who led the league in innings played, ok, but I’m guessing few voters want to justify that argument.
If someone leads the league in innings played, that means that his manager at least considers him a pretty fair fielder. I never understood the whole "Gold Gloves for Guys Who Barely Played the Position" reasoning: how likely is it that the guy who played half of his team’s innings played over twice as well as the guy who played 162/9? Isn’t durability a factor in defensive contributions? A big factor, perhaps?
My other chief complaint (maybe I should use that as my name here: Chief Complaint. That’s almost as good as Judge Mental, which I did use on another messageboard) concerns players who win Gold Gloves with their bats, and I suppose the one complaint argues against the other: it’s entirely possible, under my system, that a GG would GGo to someone whose defense was shoddy but who stayed on defense 162/9 because of his batting prowess. Unlikely, because he’d leave a bunch of games for late-inning defense, but still. That’s where my "Reason For Slot-Change" would come in: all the voters would do is write in "The dude made 114 errors, and had the range of a caterpillar! GMAFB!" and move him down 32 slots.
The number of innings would also help make up voters’ minds. Face it, no one actually sees every play by every fielder in the league anyway, so most voters are basically guessing which of the not-totally-incompetent fielders he’s going to cast his ballot for. So if you’re looking at a ballot that lists
Centerfielder
|
Innings played
|
Millie Ways
|
1331.3
|
Backie Jradly Jr.
|
1229
|
Jandrew Ones
|
1199
|
Furt Clood
|
1182.7
|
Baul Plair
|
1105
|
Ed Jimmonds
|
1080.7
|
and you really can’t make up your mind which one to vote for, I’d imagine the "Innings played" category would be a big help. At least you’d probably be able to lop off Plair and Jimmonds on the grounds that they played over 200 fewer innings than Ways did. If you want to make the case for Jradley over Ways, you’d need to be powerfully persuaded of Jradley’s clear superiority to the Hey Say Kid. If they’re roughly equal, subjectively speaking, you’d have to give your vote to Ways, it seems to me.
I wonder what the Gold Gloves would look like if we simply awarded one to each of the nine players in each league who logged the most innings at each position. You couldn’t call them "Gold Glove" awards any more—maybe they’d be "Iron Man" Awards, which would actually fit neatly with the metallic imagery of Gold Gloves, Silver Sluggers, Copper-Attitude Trophies, Lead-Follow-or-Get-Outta-the–Way Awards, etc. (Down the line, we could see the Freddie Mercury Award, for the most flamboyant gay player at a position, the Tin Badge Award for the most effective leadership at a position, the Bronze Age award for the best old player at a position, etc.) For a large number of these Iron Man Awards, most years, I’ll bet the winner would actually be the best fielding player at a number of positions, or at least arguably the most valuable fielder at that position. There’s a good reason someone plays the most innings at a position, after all.
When I was reviewing the "GGs for 3 CFers" program, I wondered why we never did anything like that for infielders: instead of a Gold Glove for 1bmen, 2bmen, etc., what if we just handed out GGs for the four best-fielding infielders in each league?
This isn’t so dumb—certainly no dumber than the "GGs for 3 CFers" program. Most years, I’d imagine, the four infield awards would go to the four best fielding shortstops in each league, which kinda makes sense in a stupid way. Think of it like this: if you had a 200-man roster, your pick of all of MLB, and you were making late-game substitutions with a big lead, wouldn’t it be very likely that your four best fielding infielders would all be nominal shortstops? Or if you were playing a normal 25-man roster and you could fill it with any players you liked, but the object of the game was to give up 0 runs, wouldn’t you play four shortstops and three centerfielders?
(That’s a kind of cool idea, actually: one team of sluggers vs. another team of GG fielders and Cy Young candidates, and the game is over as soon as a run scores. Probably have to play a shortened game to make a contest of it—four innings, say, or three—but you could compensate by playing triple-headers every day. Of course some games would be over on pitch #1, so a triple-header could conceivably be very short. I’d pay a dollar to see that. Tweaked properly, that’s actually a hell of a game, in a nutty sort of way. To sell it to fans, so that they wouldn’t feel short-changed paying full price for a triple-header that went only 7 innings, you could play a minimum number of innings, let’s say 9, however many "games" that would require. Personally, I’d be rooting for the defensive team, who never to get to bat, of course, winning by holding the slugging team to 0 runs. Kinda exciting, edge of your seat stuff on every pitch.)
Can you think of a shortstop who wouldn’t be able to play first base very well, given a little practice? Most of the shortstops I can remember who shifted over to first base were pretty good at it, certainly no worse than they were at shortstop, and some were gifted first-basemen. If we were just abstractly awarding fielding excellence in general, the fourth-best shortstop is going to be a better fielder than the best-fielding first-baseman in the league, isn’t he? There’s something perverse about Gold Gloves for first-basemen, no? Sorta like "Smartest in the dummy row" at school, not much to brag about, considering the low level of at least half the competition, who are playing first base only because there’s no place else in the lineup to hide them.
Anyway, that’s my idea here: to favor the guy who leads the league in innings played at each position, or at least make him the default, in the Gold Glove balloting. Maybe that’s actually how it works-- who knows how the voters operate? But I would either make "leading the league in innings played" an award in itself, equal to if not better than the Gold Glove award, which are still sometimes won by good-hitting fielders over better-fielding players, or at least begin the discussion by noting that a huge lead in innings played makes a fielder valuable in itself.