Gold Gloves

I've kept silent about Adam Jones winning the Gold Glove award this season, largely because the various defensive metrics indicate that he had a poor season in the field (I even highlighted it in my look ahead to the offseason). Joe Posnanski found an interesting tidbit, though:

The Doyen of Defense, John Dewan, wrote an interesting thing the other day. He
was trying to determine if Torii Hunter or Adam Jones deserved their Gold
Gloves. And while he hit several points, the one that stuck out for me was this:
Adam Jones led the league with four home run saving catches.

That explains it perfectly! Of course Adam Jones would score highly on the system used by Rawlings to determine the Gold Gloves: he looks like a great defender. He makes spectacular catches, runs gracefully, and has a great arm. Franklin Gutierrez, who turned in an all-time great defensive season for Seattle, was more deserving of the Gold Glove, but it's difficult to fault the voters when Jones made so many memorable plays. People who watched the Orioles play all season long picked up the same thing as the metrics: Jones, who frequently plays shallow, had difficulty on deep balls. Most evaluators, though, don't have the luxury of watching a full season, and it's these situations where objective metrics need to supplement subjective opinions.
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Nerd Alert

For the nerds among us, Rob Neyer pointed me to two fantastic articles today. One, at The Hardball Times, raises serious questions regarding Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA projections, specifically the Davenport Translations used in converting minor league stats to Major League equivalents. Baseball Prospectus almost never responds to criticism--a significant failing, in my opinion--and I'm curious to see if they address what would seem to be serious errors in their calculations. The second, in Sports Illustrated, writes to a more mainstream audience about the use of defensive statistics by front offices today. Given the additions made by the Orioles this offseason, specifically Felix Pie and Cesar Izturis, it is safe to say that, even if they aren't on the cutting edge, the Orioles have taken defensive metrics into account in their player evaluations.
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Evaluating Minor Leaguers

After my post earlier this morning about Luis Montanez and his age disqualifying him from prospect status despite his excellent statistics, Baseball Prospectus posted a discussion of their own about evaluating minor leaguers based on their stats. A quick comparison of Luis Montanez and Matt Wieters (go here and search for "Montanez" to see Wieters, Reimold and Montanez side-by-side):

Montanez has peak translated EQA of .248.
Wieters has a peak translated EQA of .360, the highest number in the minors.

Read those numbers like a batting average (and just ignore for a minute that Wieters has compiled his in only 107 at-bats) and you'll see why I man-crush on Matt Wieters and have ignored Luis Montanez until today. For comparison's sake, only one Major Leaguer has a 2008 EQA above .360: Albert Pujols and his .370 number. Even the league-leading .309 Wieters compiled in Frederick is impressive; it's much lower because the Carolina League is farther from the Majors than the Eastern League, and Wieters was the same age in both leagues.