2020 MLB Awards

For 1st Base:

Outs Above Average

Goldy 5
Belt 3
Rizzo -3

DRS

Rizzo 3
Goldy 1
Belt 1

UZR

Rizzo 3.9
Goldy 1.3
Belt -0.4

A mix there, but OAA isn’t part of the formula, it seems. So probably gonna be Rizzo.

Shot, BW? Naw, just wondering why many have him penciled into CF for 2021 if he has a weak bat and is not as good as many think he is defensively. Now, if O’Neill can settle in, though, we may have something.

He’s okay if you have bats in the rest of the lineup. If you’re below where you want to be offensively at 3B and in left and right field, you don’t have the luxury of having HB in CF.

I like that the coaches and managers have no input on the GG awards. In the past if a player won the silver slugger he had a very good chance of being given a GG. Coaches and managers seemed to be too influenced by offensive numbers like Ozuna’s breakout season with the bat.

Wong us great at making the hard plays, problem is the easy plays sometimes elude him and those alone would disqualify him in my eyes.

That was the case against Wong before. I don’t believe that it is the case now. Do you have any examples from the last year or two that you can think of? Because I feel like that’s probably just your memories of 2014-16 coming back.

Oneil to me is just an average outfielder though he has a good arm. Yea he makes the plays he gets to but he takes bad lines and doesn’t get to balls he should at times.

Again, any basis for this? I recall some plays in years past but can’t think of anything he should have gotten that he didn’t this year. On second thought, I do remember one play where he ran into the fence in LCF but it was a heck of a run to get there. I think what the metrics (especially Statcast, which is based on the actual ball hit and not just a theoretical “zone*) account for that the fans who dislike the analytical stuff don’t usually notice is that not all fielders and balls hit are the same. O’Neill, with his very good speed, might get to 10% more balls than an average LF. He might have one clank off his glove. The average fan thinks, geez, O’Neill clanked that one! Meanwhile, the average LF wouldn’t have even gotten there and the ball would be in the gap. Or perhaps Carlson lays out and makes a catch that fans ooh and ahh over, when O’Neill may have gotten there on the run for a much more routine catch.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. My point being, every public set of data we have this year tells me what my eyes saw…that O’Neill had a very good year with the glove. Maybe you find the data flawed but it’s not as likely if every single source all comes to the same conclusion. It may not be that way always as I’ve seen him not make some plays before that I thought he should have.

But again, these metrics don’t look at plays that go for hits in a game because a player took a wrong line or came in instead of going back. Those are things a knowledgeable coach would see, not some analytics like approach.

While I agree that some of the metrics do not see such things, there are some (specifically Statcast) that take those things into account without the bias of one’s vision. If a ball is hit at such angle and velocity, a player should have X chance of getting to it. If they do or don’t, it changes their overall rating. I trust that data as much as I trust the ball speed and shot data we see on a golf broadcast or running or pass speed on an NFL broadcast. The stuff they can collect nowadays is impressive.

Analytics will never replace the coaches who have to make decisions on the fly, though. But they do help paint a picture.

Regarding Wong (and the infielders in general), Goldy has made them all look a lot better the last couple of years. It was a mess when Carp and Jmart manned 1B.