Man, does the Cardinals’ front office really look at FP and errors still? Is there any value there?
Yes, there is absolutely value there, because as unsophisticated as they are, they tell us what our eyes tell us and what common sense tells us – this is a bad defensive team.
I say this because the Cardinals, as a team, rank 11th in all of baseball in DRS and 16th in UZR/150. Last year we were 5th in DRS and 10th in UZR/150.
I assume you’ve taken at least a 300 level statistics course in your life. Now, how big is the error term for DRS and UZR? How much multicollinearity is there in each of those measurements? Can you definitively say a team that ranks 10th is better than a team ranked 15th? Why can the two measures produce vastly different rankings?
This isn’t and hasn’t been a bad defensive team.
So, you ignore JMart at 1B, Carp at 3B and Fowler in RF? How about Ozuna in LF? Munoz at SS?
Defensive statistics still have a lot of improvement to go before they can be taken as the gospel.
Statcast data will be helpful in refining the models, but that only became publicly available last year. Even so, I would rather look at the individual components of the metrics than some combined number with an error term of some unknown size, but which is widely acknowledged to be quite big.