Silver and Diamonds

Aha!  Nate "Pecota" Silver at NYT today returns to his first (and my) first love, baseball! Though he is, of course, more geeky and fact-based than I am, 91.5 percent of the time.   He has just posted on why AL triple crown winner Miguel Cabrera should not get the nod this week for Most Valuable Player. Just one piece of evidence, favoring Mike Trout:  "One of these systems, Ultimate Zone Rating, estimates that Trout saved the Angels 11 runs with his defense in the outfield. Cabrera, a clumsy defender at third base who is more naturally suited to play first base, cost the Tigers 10 runs with his.

"Between his defense and his base running, therefore, Trout was about 35 runs more valuable to the Angels than Cabrera was to the Tigers. By contrast, the 14 additional home runs that Cabrera hit (44 against Trout’s 30) were worth about 22 extra runs for the Tigers, based on measures that convert players’ contributions to a common scale."

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