We just sent The Fielding Bible—Volume III to the printer. And, boy, are my arms tired! We have literally spent several thousand man-hours of research since the last volume came out. It feels like most of that was in the last few weeks as we tried to meet our deadline.
One of the sections of the book is "101 Things You Didn’t Know About Defense". We share numbers 57 and 58 with you below.
57. Carl Who?
Sam Fuld was credited with a Good Fielding Play on 10 percent of his touches in 2011, the most among outfielders.
| Player |
Position |
Good Fielding Plays per Touch |
| Sam Fuld |
LF |
10.1% |
| Carlos Gonzalez |
LF |
7.4% |
| Desmond Jennings |
LF |
7.0% |
| Carlos Lee |
LF |
6.8% |
| Carlos Gomez |
CF |
6.7% |
58. Oh that Carl
When an outfielder fields a batted ball and gets it back to the infield especially quickly, stopping advancing runners in their tracks, we credit him with a Good Fielding Play for Preventing Extra Bases. If the outfielder does this often enough, those plays can save the team runs. Over the last three years, Carl Crawford has saved more runs (GFP/DME Runs Saved) on these plays than any other outfielder in baseball.
| Player |
Runs Saved Preventing Extra Bases |
| Carl Crawford |
5 |
| Jason Bay |
4 |
| Raul Ibanez |
4 |
| Ryan Braun |
4 |
| Three tied with |
2 |
A couple of notes on these:
Sam Fuld was amazing in 2011. It seemed like there was a Sam Fuld Web Gem on ESPN every other day despite the fact that he only played about half-time last year. He had 298 Touches in left field in 2011. That’s an estimate of how many times he touched a ball playing the outfield. He had 30 Good Fielding Plays in left, or 10.1 percent of his touches.
GFP/DME Runs Saved—this is one of the newest features in the book. Based on Baseball Info Solutions’ tracking of 28 different types of Good Fielding Plays (GFP) and 54 types of Defensive Misplays and Errors (DME), we estimate how many runs are saved or lost to the team on these plays. For example, Carl Crawford made a Good Play "Holds to Single" 17 times in the last three years. This saves bases which, in turn, saves runs. We use sabermetric techniques to come up with good estimates of those saved runs.
The Fielding Bible—Volume III will be out on March 1. If you pre-order from the publisher, ACTA Sports, by March 1, they will send you book out the minute it comes in, and if you mention Stat of the Week (or use the discount code SOTW), you will get a 15 percent discount.