Gold Glove Snub Shows Challenges in Process

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Image via Rawlings - rawlings.com

Rawlings Gold Glove Award

On Wednesday the nominees were announced for the 67th annual Rawlings Gold Glove Awards, providing our 67th annual reminder of how difficult it is to determine baseball’s top defenders. The Brewers, one of the best defensive teams in baseball, have just one player among the National League’s top three defenders at any position: First baseman Carlos Santana, who played about two-thirds of his games this season with the Pirates. The Brewers went out of their way to point out that Brice Turang, one of the game’s best defenders at second base, is not among the finalists at that position.

The Gold Gloves are one of most prominent awards not selected by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA). While the BBWAA Awards (including Most Valuable Player and Cy Young) are the result of a voting process that has remained nearly constant throughout their history, the Gold Glove selection process has varied a bit over the years. Most recently, in 2013 Rawlings partnered with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) to add a statistical component to the awards. Today SABR’s Defensive Index makes up 25% of the selection total, with the remainder coming from votes from a pool of managers and coaches. 

The Gold Glove selection process has gotten better in recent years, rebounding from perhaps its lowest point in 1999 when voters selected Rangers first baseman Rafael Palmeiro despite the fact that he had played just 28 games at the position that season. Nonetheless, the criteria voters are using remains unclear, and establishing defensive value remains one of the biggest challenges for baseball’s sabermetric community.

To start, the qualities that get lumped together as “defense” are a collection of independent skills and measuring them together means weighing and prioritizing a collection of moving parts. With the exception of catchers (who have their own, even more difficult to quantify set of inputs), being an excellent defender at most positions requires a combination of range, fielding and throwing skills, with a deficit in any one all but negating the others. Turang is a good demonstration of this: Baseball Savant ranks him well above average in range, as measured in their Outs Above Average stat, but only has him in the 16th percentile in arm strength. As a result of those and other inputs, on the whole they grade him out just slightly above average in fielding value.

There is also a longstanding question about whether a single year of defensive data is a large enough sample size to create any kind of meaningful conclusions. Turang played 1043 innings in the field this season and was credited with a total of 481 defensive “chances,” about four per nine innings. The large majority of those innings were at second base, where most of the throws are short and require more nuance than brute force. It’s unclear how many times Turang had the opportunity to “air it out” and unleash his strongest throws at the position, but it was likely a small percentage of his total chances. Nonetheless, he was evaluated based on those limited opportunities to show what he can do.

Single Season Metrics?

Furthermore, single season defensive metrics sometimes vary wildly among sources. As the Brewers noted in the tweet linked above, Turang led all National League second basemen in Baseball Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) this season. Based at least in part on that number, Baseball Reference estimates Turang was worth 1.7 wins above replacement on defense this season. FanGraphs’ data, however, arrived at the conclusion that Turang’s defense was worth just 4.7 runs this season, including a value bump for his defensive position. That’s about half a win. And, as noted above, Baseball Savant has Turang in just the 51st percentile in defensive value. In August SABR’s Defensive Index, the statistic used as an input in the Gold Glove voting, was somewhere in the middle: When they released the numbers Turang was the sport’s 14th highest rated defensive player, but was behind three other National League second basemen. Those three players (Nico Hoerner of the Cubs, Ha-Seong Kim of the Padres and Bryson Stott of the Phillies) were the eventual finalists for the Gold Glove.

Finally, there’s also a question of how playing time should factor into these awards. As noted above, Turang played just over 900 innings at second base this season. That’s significantly less than Nico Hoerner (1167) and Bryson Stott (1294 1/3). Ha-Seong Kim logged fewer innings at second, but more at short and also played third. To rack up Defensive Runs Saved like he did Turang had to be extremely dynamic in fewer opportunities, but the other side of that argument is that a player like Hoerner or Stott may have been more valuable to their teams by logging the equivalent of dozens more full games at the position.

Despite the somewhat random nature of Gold Glove voting results, these awards do matter. In addition to the prestige and honor that comes with being selected as a Gold Glove honoree, this award is tied to a common incentive in player contracts. According to Cot’s Contracts, at least seven members of the 2023 Brewers had a clause in their contract that would earn them a bonus if they won the award. Everyone involved has a reason to want to make sure these awards go to the right people, but even under a new selection system we’re once again reminded that it’s a near impossible task.