Plus plays are plays made that wouldn't have been made by an average fielder at the position. Minus plays are plays that should have been made, but aren't and aren't necessarily an error.

It's probably debatable how much more plus and less minus plays correlates to actual winning, but for the players it definitely counts in Gold Glove consideration... FWIW.

Also, I'm not certain that glove is reflected in the 1B's own stats, but instead in reduced throwing errors for the infielders. So I'm not convinced that pjf's example tells me that glove does not matter at 1B, although it might be range that reduces infield throwing errors.

I've considered the possibility of this before, but there is really no evidence that fielding percentage for the other infielders is based off anything but their own intrinsic glove + arm acc. I think it's just a glitch that 1B commit the wrong number of errors

It's probably debatable how much more plus and less minus plays correlates to actual winning

That's a preposterous statement. Without getting into another novela about it, the summary is that plus plays skew batting average towards the pitcher and minus plays skew batting average towards the hitter. Plus plays convert to fewer baserunners, which convert to fewer runs against, which convert to better Pythagorean expectation, which convert to actual wins in the standings. The opposite is true for Minus plays- they convert to more baserunners against, which convert to more runs against, worse Pythagorean, more losses. It is a fundamental principle and not debatable, I'm not sure what exactly prompted your statement or what has you skeptical

Sorry, didn't mean to muddy the waters. Fact is, I value plus-minus highly. So do you. And I agree with your analysis. My fundamental theory of baseball defense is that the goal is to get to three outs and 27 outs as efficiently as possible.

But I'm sure we could find someone here who'd want to argue that plus and minus are cosmetic. Probably shouldn't have even brought it up.

Certain things are cosmetic, definitely. Not +/- though, those are relative to positional par values and skew the batter/pitcher paired comparison. It surely affects win percentage with added value over league average and especially over bad teams

Opinions on this guy at SS? I was REALLY hoping his Glove/AA would improve a little more but that does not look to be the case.

Yean Carlos Uribe

I'm fine with guys like him at SS, I have a similar player playing SS on my Atlanta team (Mercado). He's approximately par at defense and he's better than par on offense so the net amount is above average. Over time his glove and AA will crawl towards 85, he's still young

Posted by mtanton07 on 11/2/2018 2:17:00 PM (view original):
Opinions on this guy at SS? I was REALLY hoping his Glove/AA would improve a little more but that does not look to be the case.

Yean Carlos Uribe

While my preference would be to play this guy at 2B or 3B, I'd play him at SS if I didn't have a better glove/bat combo in the organization. This guy is similar and costs about 15 plays per season compared to a fielder who's right at recommendations; take those away from his batting line and that's about 50 points of OPS he loses. Your guys's bat is more than 50 points of OPS better than most average SSs.

Posted by pjfoster13 on 11/2/2018 2:46:00 PM (view original):
I'm fine with guys like him at SS, I have a similar player playing SS on my Atlanta team (Mercado). He's approximately par at defense and he's better than par on offense so the net amount is above average. Over time his glove and AA will crawl towards 85, he's still young

His glove/AA probably aren't crawling anywhere. He got a one-point ST bump this season and that's probably the end of it; it's the 23-year-old international bug. If he had gone to college I'd think there was some possibility of improvement.

But there's a really important point to be made about the general case here; glove and AA are the ratings most likely to pick up occasional points here and there after the rest of improvement is done, and I have had a number of players whose glove/AA get a 3-4 point growth in the season (usually 4th pro season, sometimes 5th) in which everything else stops developing.