UZR continues to claim Nelson Cruz is one of the worst defenders in ML baseball, but many of those who watch the games see him as average/acceptable. I was curious and procrastinating, so I went to fangraphs and the web to figure the situation out. The end result? I think it is safe to say UZR is useless and Inside Edge says Nelson Cruz is an average RF. If you care how I came to that conclusion read onward.
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First of all, UZR claims Nelson Cruz range has cost the M's 7.3 runs compared to an average RF in 44 games worth of innings in RF. Note, this is just the cost due to his range and does not include throwing arm and error deficiencies.
That seems like a lot of runs in 44 games even for a bad fielder, so I started to wonder how many missed catches this represents. My understanding is that UZR uses the average run value for a fly ball to get an estimate of the cost of a misplayed ball, but I could be wrong. I read up on UZR and found that they assign a 0.83 run difference between catching or not catching a ball hit in the air to the outfield. On aggregate, this would mean that Nelson Cruz missed 9 balls in play compared to the average RF in just 44 games, or a catch every 5 games.
Fortunately, fangraphs also has their Inside Edge fielding data where the each play is binned by the likelihood that a ML fielder would make the play, where the bins are 90-100%, 60-90%, 40-60%, 10-40%, 1-10%, and 0%. Taking out the 18 balls in play deemed impossible to catch (the 0% bin), Nelson Cruz has had 104 playable balls hit his way and made 90 catches. So we are only talking about 14 balls he had a chance to catch, but did not do so, according to Inside Edge.
The additional aspect of Inside Edge that is fun is that I can find the actual average performance for RF in 2014 on balls in each zone and use this performance to predict how many plays this mythical average RF would have made if they had been standing in RF for the M's instead of Nelson Cruz. The answer? 90.8 catches, 0.8 plays better than Nelson Cruz at a value of 2/3 of a run. My guess is most of you gave up on UZR a long time ago, but it is fun to put the truth to a common misperception; there is no evidence that Nelson Cruz is a liability in the outfield.