Bill James on Fielding, Part 9

One great thing about Bill James has always been his willingness to disagree with his friends, publicly. This is actually a long-established and well-respected practice among academics, but has generally been spurned by sportswriters. If less so now than before. Anyway, over at Bill James Online, Bill's been in the middle of an opus about fielding stats, and wrote the following about his friend and partner John Dewan's prodigious work, for decades now, with fielding statistics...

Bill's argument is that need good, raw, publicly available fielding statistics. Which we've never really had, and still don't. And Bill's absolutely right ... or would have been five years ago. Now I don't think anyone really gives a damn. The new tracking technology is going to utterly revolutionize the analysis of current players, and those of who care about Keith Hernandez's prowess are, I'm afraid, in a distinct minority.

Actually, there's plenty of tremendous data for Keith Hernandez and everyone else who's played in the 1980s and since. You just have to pay for it. Which is certainly a barrier to entry, if hardly impenetrable. The fact is we'll never have great data on guys before the '80s, and we never will.