The Gold Glove Awards make more sense than they used to ... but they don't make that much sense, still.
As I'm sure you'll recall, last year Rawlings was gracious and sensible enough to (finally) inject some machine intelligence into the process, and now SABR's Defensive Index essentially accounts for about 25 percent of the voting. Which I think helps prevent any truly egregious choices. You know, like four (or five) of the five Gold Gloves the coaches and managers (and their proxies) gave Derek Jeter. Because now it's probably going to be exceptionally difficult for any player to win a Gold Glove if the metrics just hate him.
But if the metrics think he's, you know, at least okay?
Well, then there's plenty of room for the coaches and the managers (and their chosen proxies) to do whatever they like. Which too often means handing out awards to whomever happened to have won them last year.
How else to explain Adam Jones winning his fourth Gold Glove? How else to explain J.J. Hardy winning his third straight Gold Glove. How else to explain Yadier Molina winning his seventh straight, even though a) Molina started only 107 games behind the plate, and b) Jonathan Lucroy scored wonderfully in our measures of both pitch-framing and blocking.
But of course the vast majority of voters wouldn't look at those measures. They know Molina throws better than Lucroy, and they know Molina's a safe choice, having won six in a row already.
Hey, nobody's perfect. As I admitted just a few days ago. What's frustrating is how few voters seem to understand that a player's fielding performance can fluctuate from season to season, just like his hitting performance manifestly can (and usually does).
I'm just glad we've now got such a fine alternative.
