Posted by dahsdebater on 6/1/2019 3:31:00 PM (view original):
Yeah. It's clearly meaningless to say it's "no small feat" to play RF in Coors. The next 3 guys who played RF in Coors were all defensively incompetent. RF in Coors is still RF. Means a lot less than CF in LA.
Guess what. Teams play defensive liabilities.
The first few Astros CFers at Minute Maid, which had the deepest CF in baseball at the time, were Richard Hidalgo, Lance Berkman, and a 37 yr old Craig Biggio.
Clearly centerfield isn’t an important position if the Astros are willing to put two big, slow dudes, and a 37 yr old, to play the deepest centerfield in baseball.
Or...
the bigger field exaggerates how bad a defensive liability liability can get.
Represented by when Brad Hawpe, from 2007-2009 had a -8 dWar. He also cost his team
57 runs!
Over the course of Burnitz 14 year career, Burnitz cost his team 27 runs. 15 of those came from his one year with the Rockies.
Carlos Gonzalez was one of the better defensive rightfielders in baseball during his prime. He had the speed to efficiently steal 20 bases a year. He also had one of the better arms in the game. He even won 2 Gold Gloves. But even he was just about average, accounting for a total of 3 DRS in his time as a Rockies RF.
Which makes Larry Walker’s defensive prowess more outstanding. We didn’t have DRS until 2003 by the looks of FanGraphs, but in their first year, Walker saved his team 10 runs. His Total Zone (the pre-cursor to DRS) was +28 from 1996-2001. We don’t have TZ or DRS from 2002 in FanGraphs, but his UZR that year was 3.4
My point is Coors Field amplified his defensive ability in RF with the bigger outfield than say, a softball park like Camden Yards or Yankee Stadium would.