Wizardry: Baseball's All-Time Greatest Fielders Revealed

Sabermetrics, the systematic analysis of baseball statistics, has evolved over time to resemble something of a science, attracting fans from diverse professional and educational backgrounds, all fascinated by both the analysis itself and the objective insights it provides into the game. Although fans and analysts have devoted exhaustive efforts to developing statistics that measure offensive performance, defensive metrics have historically been deemed too difficult to measure accurately and objectively. In Wizardry: Baseball's All-Time Greatest Fielders Revealed, Michael Humphreys introduces a system that conclusively quantifies fielding statistics and compares player performance from as early as 1893 by estimating how many runs each fielder "saved" or "allowed." While a number of methods for analyzing defense have recently gained exposure, they rely on expensive proprietary data held by professional sports statistics companies and only capture information drawn from the contemporary era. Humphreys' method, Defensive Runs Analysis (DRA), makes unique use of free, open source data available to the average fan and incorporates equalizing historical factors to place players from different eras on equal footing. Wizardry is the first book to systematically rank and profile the greatest fielders at each position from throughout major league history. To frame and validate his results, the author tests DRA data against other well-known statistical measures and also presents an analysis of other defensive statistical metrics. Casual fans with little mathematical background will appreciate Wizardry's accessible style while professional statisticians will value the opportunity to validate Humphreys' methodology and results. Given the topic and the author's presentation of the material, the book will draw in both the serious, baseball statistics audience and the average fan.

Table of Contents:
Preface Part One: Motivations and Methods 1. The Big Picture 2. One Way to Measure Fielding 3. Measuring the Many Measures of Fielding 4. Summing Up Fielding Careers in One Number . . . and Attaching Asterisks Thereto 5. Putting Top Players from Different Eras on 'Equal' Footing Part Two: The Greatest Fielders of All-Time 6. Shortstop 7. Second Base 8. Center Field 9. Third Base 10. Right Field 11. Left Field 12. First Base 13. Catcher Part Three: Fielding in the Context of Pitching, Hitting and Base Running 14. (A Select Few of) Baseball's All-Time Greatest Pitchers 15. Incorporating Fielding Ratings into Overall Player Ratings 16. Conclusion Appendices A. Defensive Regression Analysis ("DRA") B. Notes on the history of fielding analysis C. Chart of alternative fielding systems D. Career DRA ratings for all fielders with 3,000 innings or estimated innings at one position E. Single-season DRA ratings for all fielders since 1893 (Available book's website) F. Certain data used to develop DRA (Available book's website) Endnotes Glossary

About the Author :
Michael A. Humphreys advises on tax aspects of international capital markets transactions at Ernst & Young LLP.

Review :
The book of the season . . . comes from Michael Humphreys . . . who has spent years meticulously extracting reads on historical defensive performance from the flawed and fragmentary numbers we have to go by, and he now offers the definitive work on the subject . . . A careful, thoughtful system that will make you appreciate all the more the genius of the late Yankees second baseman Joe Gordon or the peripatetic and vastly underrated outfielder Kenny Lofton . . . A representation of the future of statistical sabermetrics, which in years to come is quite likely to become more focused less on telling the future than on wresting meaning out of the past." -- Tim Marchman, The Wall Street Journal "Excellent." -- David Schoenfeld, ESPN ("Sweet Spot" blog) "Humphreys writes capably and makes the math-heavy parts as readable as anyone could. The outcome should attract all dedicated baseball fans and stat hounds." -- Library Journal "Michael Humphreys does for fielding what Neil deGrasse Tyson does for astrophysics: he takes an incredibly complex subject and makes a reader who once felt dumb feel smart. He has cut through the cloud of my unknowing and helped me to understand what major league fielding really is and how it can be quantified. Wizardry is the best book yet on the subject." -- Allen Barra, writer for The Wall Street Journal "Fielding is the hardest aspect of baseball in which to rate performance. In his fascinating book, Michael Humphreys should get the Gold Glove for historical fielding evaluation. With carefully derived formulae, he rates Aaron, Clemente, Gordon and Hooper as saving 100+ runs more than does Total Baseball, while Mazeroski and Ozzie Smith saved their teams over 100 fewer. And that's just among Hall of Famers! Taken seriously, as it should be, this book will substantially shake up our all-around rankings of players." -- Michael J. Schell, Moffitt Cancer Center, author of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters and Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers "Wizardry is a very engaging book. Out of all of the modern methods of evaluating fielding, [the method introduced in Wizardry, DRA,] is the one method where readers can duplicate the results. The defensive runs produced by DRA match up well with [published defensive runs estimates based on proprietary data]. While all of these defensive metrics can vary widely from season to season, they have their biggest impact when evaluating a player's defensive career. In a perfect world, the gatekeepers to the Hall of Fame will start to rely on defensive metrics such as DRA, rather than how many Gold Gloves a player won, to assess a player's defensive contributions on the field."--Philip A. Yates, The American Statistician