I think I will spend the next few weeks taking a look at the various awards and whatever jumps out at me regarding the topic.

Well whatever minute amount of relevance the Gold Glove Award was still clinging to has now dissipated altogether. New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter and Seattle Mariners’ second baseman Bret Boone are the best middle infield combination in the American League, according to baseball’s managers and coaches. They both won Gold Gloves today. I am not sure they could have picked a worse combination. In his best defensive season of his career, Derek Jeter ranked 8th out of 11 qualified American League shortstops in Range Factor and 6th in Zone Rating. Boone ranked last among qualified second basemen in both categories. There is simply no basis for awarding either player a Gold Glove.

What an opportune time for me to link over to Rich Lederer’s Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat, where, in his latest installment of Abstracts of the Abstracts (a must-read series for anyone behind on his James), Lederer takes a look at Bill James’ 1984 Baseball Abstract in which James wrote perhaps his finest essay ever. Famously, James quipped…

But perspective can be gained only when details are lost. A sense of the size of everything and the relationships between everything—this can never be put together from details. For the most essential fact of a forest is this: The forest itself is immensely larger than anything inside of it. That is why, of course, you can’t see the forest for the trees; each detail, in proportion to its size and your proximity to it, obscures a thousand or a million other details.

How does this apply to the 2004 American League Gold Glove Awards? Well I am sure managers and coaches alike think Bret Boone is quite a gamer and there is no doubt that Derek Jeter seems like the consumate professional and these matters doubtless seep into an insider’s thinking. The informed outsider, however, can plainly see the Bret Boone and Derek Jeter do not make nearly as many plays as, say, Bobby Crosby and Orlando Hudson.

While we all would have loved to play Major League ball, be happy you realize you can’t see the “forest for the trees”.

Comments are closed