Not Entirely as Advertised

The reports of Nate McLouth's horrible defense have been perhaps exaggerated.

As you may already know, the aforementioned McLouth was awarded one of the three NL Gold Glove awards given to outfielders. Why they don't classify the awards among LF, CF, and RF is still beyond me, but whatever. As you also may already know, Mr. McClouth put up (down?) a whopping minus-40 on John Dewan's +/- system, which was the worst among all qualifying centerfielders in major league baseball. This of course led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the statistically-inclined community (myself included), who felt that this was another in the long line of stupid decisions made by supposedly intelligent "baseball people" like managers and the BBWAA.

What Dewan says in the post linked above dovetails nicely with my thoughts on McLouth's defense. When I first found out that he was -40 in the plus/minus system for 2008, I thought that number seemed unexpectedly low, not because I rated McLouth's defense highly, but because I just didn't think he was that terrible. When I voted in Tom Tango's scouting report, I believe I gave McClouth about an average rating, which is slightly generous, but my bottom line is that I consider him a below-average center fielder, but not by much.

McLouth's problem (as many sensible analysts have noted), is that he does not get to as many balls as he should, whether by poor reaction off the bat, or by taking bad routes to the ball. I think that supports Dewan's analysis showing that he makes sizeable numbers of "good" and "bad" plays. To a large extent with Nate, it's feast or famine with the plays that are not considered "average." It seems that he either gets a solid read right away and makes a good play on tough ball, or he misreads it and loses the battle while trying to chase it down. Since the official scorer has no concept of outfield errors other than dropping fly balls (or so it seems), Mr. McLouth isn't punished on the score sheet for his poor performance.

The good news is that he generally knows what to do with the ball once he gets it, which keeps his errors low, and subsequently keeps his fielding percentage high, thus he gets the love from the MSM and the managers when they manage to talk about defense. What we can all hope for is that McCutcheon the Outfielder is ready very soon, so he can take over center and move Nate to left field, where he will do less damage. Until then, the Pirates will continue to give up runs in center field, despite the fact that a guy with a Gold Glove plays there.