Mid-season Fielding Bible stats

Earlier in the year, I described several play by play fielding systems and combined the results on all the systems to come up with one fielding rating for each player at each position. Links to descriptions of the systems and results can be found here. The unfortunate thing is that the three systems which are arguably the best systems - Ultimate Zone Rating, Fielding Bible and Probabilistic Model of Range have not been available during the season. Also, Ultimate Zone Rating and Fielding Bible have been only partially available after the season.

The Fielding Bible data is now available on Bill James Online but it's a subscription site. It's a relatively new site and still a work in progress. It already provides quite a few stats which you won't find anywhere else during the season such as the Fielding Bible data and base running data (e.g How many times did Curtis Granderson go from first to third on a single? second to home on a single? , etc.) It is still lacking in articles but they are working on that. You can figure out for yourself whether it is worth $3.00 per month by taking their free tour.

I can't go into a great deal of detail because it's premium content but Table 1 below presents a brief summary of the fielding data for the Tigers through yesterday. Using Placido Polanco as an example, we can see that he has a +/- of +1 meaning that he has made one play in his zone above what the average second baseman has made. He ranks 11th in the majors so far. All of the Tigers regulars rank roughly somewhere close to average on this stat. The biggest surprise is Granderson who usually ranks well above average of range stats. In fact, he ranked 5th in 2006 and 4th in 2007 on this particular system. The sample sizes are still small for outfielders though (especially one who missed most of April). We'll see where he ranks after a full season of data.

Table 1: Fielding Bible data (through July 3, 2008)

Player	Position	+/-	Rank
Miguel Cabrera	First base	-5	23
Placido Polanco	Second base	+1	11
Edgar Renteria	Shortstop	-1	19
Carlos Guillen	Third base	-4	18
Curtis Granderson	Center fielder	0	19
Magglio Ordonez	Right fielder	0	14