Dan Uggla is not a bad second baseman
While the prevailing thought tends to be that Dan Uggla is all hit and no glove, the stats prove differently.
David Pinto of Baseball Musings fame ran his range factor stats on all the second baseman in the game today and he came up with surprising result, at least to most people, the Marlins finished first in the second base category.
Danny finished fourth in the individual category (I'm guessing that Amezaga and Andino pushed the Marlins to the top of the list when Danny wasn't in the lineup.)
Mr. Pinto being very skeptical of the results, he is a baseball fan after all, and he saw the All-Star game, so he investigated further.
And what he found out is that Danny can play second, and do it quite well. Now, if you read the post, and you should, a lot of Uggla's success as determined by the range factor stats has to do with positioning. Whether Andy Fox is calling the shots or if Danny just knows where to go, I can't say. But I do know this, if the sports writers keep harping on improving the right-side of the infield defense, talking about moving Uggla is a waste of time.
And oh, by the way, when our friend Sky at Beyond the Box Score complied his numbers for all of the major league players, which includes hitting and fielding, Danny finished in the top 30 players in all of baseball. The actual number Danny ended up being ranked was the 28th best position player in the game. And that ain't too bad.
Who knows, maybe if we trade him we can get four crappy minor leaguers in return. One can only hope.
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2B or not 2B
Not sure if that is the standard range factor mentioned, but regular RF was only state of the art 25 years ago.
With Fiedling Bible +/- (possibly the best publicly available number today), Uggla was above average in 2008, at + 4, 10th in baseball.
In 2007 his numbers were awful tho, at -19. So maybe some people think he is still as bad as he was in 2007, but he seems pretty good now.
by elricsi on Nov 11, 2008 12:05 PM EST reply actions 0 recs
Uggla rated very well in most zone-based metrics this year.
Same with Hanley Ramirez.
They both stunk it up in every season prior to this one, by the same metrics. What does that mean? Uh, good question.
Do you Marlins’ fans feel like they improved, having watched them all season? Did they position themselves differently? Do anything differently?
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
by Sky Kalkman on Nov 11, 2008 3:30 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

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