In fact the tricky part now is to figure out how to put this into practice in team building, in deciding where to position players (who should be in center field? etc.).

If you know now why a player from 1894 or 1923 or 1975 or 2008 is a C/B- at their position, how can you determine who will be better to use defensively between that player and another from another year with similar letter grades?

In general - and clicking on that link I used to compare Raines to the average for his season

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/field.shtml

is a good starting point and demonstrates this - fielding has improved season after season in a linear way. Range is more complicated. It has gone UP in a linear way year after year since 1871. This is, I assume, due to increases in strikeouts, which reduce the number of putouts and assists in the field. The page I just linked to above shows that defensive chances (CH = putouts + assists + errors per 9 innings) has decreased per game from 47 in the 1870s to 37 today.

We know that 19th century fielders bring down defensive quality here, that being because a B for 1894 is not as good as a B for fielding in 2015. But how do we figure out who has more range - the 1894 player with a B or the 2015 player at the same position with a B range? Technically a B in 2015 should be inferior to a B in 1894, which involved more putouts, but I am sure that this is how it works nor how it should in practice. So here I will ask if anyone understands this part better than I do.

In putting together some fielding-based teams lately I have been relying on performance history - how many errors, how many + or - plays on average, though that is no guarantee of anything in the future. Ideas?

Posted by contrarian23 on 3/3/2016 11:55:00 PM (view original):
The best part about this thread is it's given me a couple of new owners to block permanently, thus reducing the amount of time I need to spend on the forums.

Ha! Same here.

Player A would be 10 for 10 and player B would be 0 for 0. Player B would not be credited by the official scorer as having missed an opportunity. "Ordinary effort" is the language used by the official scorer to determine if a batted ball is playable. Line drives to left field are not playable with ordinary effort. Cyber spot might get to these balls but in sim league we don't use cyber spot, we use real stats generated by real humans who have been scored by official scoring methods prescribed by MLB.

This thread is still going on?

Longer than the guitar solo in "Inna Godda Divida"

Due to the nature of this thread I will bow out as not to be associated with a hater.

P.S: I have diabetic nerve pain so typing is hard for me these days.(zooming around with a mouse is fine though.)

And thanks for the kind words Prof. I have mad respect for you as well as Crazy Stengel and Contrarian too, who I have had disagreements with as well.

Grizzly, you make this game and this site a better place. Stay well man.

d_rocks97, thanks for the kind words, but really I am not in the top 25% of people who know how the SIM works. Still, I am now confident about what the fielding ratings mean, though how they normalize from era to era - I understand the idea of it, but not how to decide what it means in practice.

Grizzly, I have some nerve problems sometimes, nothing as bad as what you are going though. I am sure you are on real medication, but I find that some Valerian root - which you can find in pill form in any health food type store, helps - it works to relax nerves, both in the sense of our being nervous and in the physical sense of calming our physical nerves to provide some relief. I hope you are better soon.

Get well, Griz. ...

Thanks Prof, I'll try that. And also thanks Contrarian and Doc for the kind words.

I was hoping this would become another juggalosteve thread, but it took a different direction. Oh, well.

....or at least another 'left-handed 2B' thread....