Thursday, January 31, 2008

Giarratano, Total Zone and other links

Here is a roundup of some interesting items on the net today:

The Tigers have released once promising infield prospect Tony Giarratano. This happened after the oft injured shortstop had a setback with his surgically repaired shoulder earlier in the week. this is what Dave Dombrowski had to say about the move:
“Unfortunately, Tony has not be able to recover from his previous surgery and it does not appear feasible for him to continue his career at this time,” Tigers President, Chief Executive Officer and General Manager David Dombrowski said.
Sean Smith at The Hardball Times has come up with a new defensive statistic called Total Zone. There are already a bunch of new defensive stats which I've already covered this month so why do we need another one? Well, those stats were derived using detailed play by play data which has only been available the past few years. What do we do when we want to evaluate players from earlier eras? Smith has developed a system using retrosheet play by play data and has applied it to players going back to 1956. He provides rankings of players from 1956-1986.

I will surely have more to say about his system after I've had a chance to look at the data more carefully. For now, I'll point you to Billfer who has listed the best Tigers fielders, according to this system, from 1956-1986.

Potthole has an interview with Pedro Cotto at the Surge. Cotto is not a big time prospect but he has been a popular player among Tigers minor league fans the last couple of years.

Kevin Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus lists his top 100 prospects. It's not premium content so check it out. Rick Porcello is ranked #11. Keith Law at ESPN also has his top 100 list up. Porcello is number #22 on his list.

Mike McClary continues his series on obscure former Tigers by saying happy birthday to Dave Stegman.

SG (Replacement Level Yankee Blog) has done Diamond Mind Simulations of the 2008 season using his own CAIRO projections and has the Tigers winning 91 games (the average of many simulations) and winning the AL Central.

2 comments:

  1. Just in case you're not aware, Sean stopped TotalZone in 1986 because STATS zone rating data is available from 1987 on. So with the two, you've got the past 50 years covered. I've collected links to user-friendly fielding data here:

    http://skyking162.com/2008/01/fielding-stats-for-everybody/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Sky. I did know about SG's spreadsheet but it's good to see you've got links to many years of fielding data in one place. I was just reading your blog. You've got a lot of great stuff over there.

    Lee

    ReplyDelete

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