Atlanta Braves Gold Glove Candidates stacked up against the rest
By Fred Owens
Five members of the 2018 Atlanta Braves await the announcement of this season’s Rawlings Gold Glove winners on Sunday, November 4.
Last week Alan gave everyone the list of finalists and wondered whether a couple of Atlanta Braves were snubbed. Eligibility and voting rules aren’t all that complicated.
Qualifying pitchers threw at least 142 innings before team game 143. That virtually eliminates relief pitchers, at least so far.
Catchers must have played in 71 games before game 143, infielders and outfielder must have played at least 713 innings before game 143 and qualify at the position where he played the most innings.
Together the innings pitched and 713 inning rules prevent a player with numbers that look good but came in a small sample size, from claiming an award a full-time player earned.
The Voters
The manager and coaches on each team vote for players on other teams at each position and must sign the completed ballot.
Only players listed in the resource guide provided by Rawlings are eligible and then only at the specific position listed. The rules always required the vote be independent of offense but many felt offensive prowess crept in any way.
To combat that, in 2013 Rawlings came to an agreement with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) to provide a standard set of metrics called the SABR Defensive Index (SDI) along with the guide.
The SABR Defensive Index
There’s a plethora of metrics available and of course teams have their own. SDI attempts to consolidate the best of those metrics, so all coaches and managers use the same data.
According to Rawlings SDI combines measures from five (5) different defensive data sources Details from SABR spell that out more specifically. The index includes:
- Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) from Baseball Info Solutions
- Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR)
- Runs Effectively Defended
- Defensive Regression Analysis
- Total Zone Rating
The committee SABR formed to devise SDI devised a way to convert the runs saves totals from SDI into 30 votes for each award. In the end, SDI makes up 25% of the final vote but SABR believes that because the other voters use SDI, it influences their votes as well.
With that out of the way here’s a look at how each award stacks up statistically.