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Tutorials: Fielding Stats

Posted by Neil Paine on February 3, 2010

We get a lot of requests for fielding leaderboards, but not many people realize they can actually create their own using tools we already have on the site. With that in mind, today we're going to take a look at some questions you can answer using the fielding stats pages we have for each league.

To get to a fielding stats page, first start at a league's main page. Underneath the banner ad, there's a navbar with tabs that will drop down to give you more options when you roll your mouse over them (denoted by "[+]"). One of them is for fielding, so roll over "Fielding [+]" and click on "Standard Fielding". This page has traditional fielding stats for every team and player in the league across all positions, and you can sort the tables by clicking on the header of the column you want to order the teams/players by. If you want to see a breakdown of games by position for the league, mouse over Fielding [+] again and click "Appearances". And if you want to break down player and team fielding stats by position, mouse over Fielding [+], then click the position you'd like to see. There you'll find traditional stats again, but also advanced categories that use play-by-play to dig into a deeper level of detail.

Now that you're armed with this knowledge, here's a quick quiz to test your ability to find specific pieces of information on the fielding pages:

1) Which team led the AL in defensive efficiency in 1976?
2) Which team led the 1995 NL in 6-4-3 double plays?
3) Who led the majors in appearances at SS in 1943?
4) Who led all AL second basemen in assists in 1954?
5) Who was the NL's best center fielder by TotalZone Runs Above Avg. in 1961?
1) New York Yankees
2) Philadelphia Phillies
3) Luke Appling
4) Bobby Avila
5) Vada Pinson

(See more Baseball-Reference Tutorials here.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “Tutorials: Fielding Stats”

  1. What I'd like to see are the feilding stats in the Play Index. Although I have to agree that the fielding stats in the rest of the site are just superb.

  2. these are great, ive never really payed attention to the fielding stats on this site before.
    do total fielding runs adjust for, e.g. percent of all hits being ground balls to determine a shortstop's value? becuase if they dont, a team with more breaking ball pitchers will favor the infield, and vice versa.

  3. Yeah, Sean Smith makes a lot of adjustments like that. He wrote some stuff at the Hardball Times explaining the TotalZone system:

    Also, we have a page on the method as well:

  4. Dave Pearson Says:

    How do I look at just batting statistic for a given position for a given year? For example, I want batting stats for all catchers from last year.

  5. Okay, take it easy.

  6. Woah, me and Dave Pearson posted at the exact same time. My last message was meant for Neil Paine, a.k.a. Painsies.

  7. Johnny Twisto Says:

    I still hope that true leaderboards will be on the way some time....

  8. Johnny Twisto Says:

    How did 4 posts all appear at the same time? Bizarre. I thought I must have posted on the wrong page for a second.

  9. Johnny Twisto Says:

    Dave Pearson, it depends what you are looking for. If you look at the league batting splits page, you can find the total batting stats for all catchers, or break that down by team. Using the PI, you could find the individual batting stats for everyone who played catcher last year, or who played at least X games at catcher. But if you are looking for individual stats for all catchers _just_ during their time at catcher, I don't _think_ you can do that (unless I've forgotten or overlooked something).