And UZR isn't wanting to "see something that looks hard." Since baseball began, SSs have had to range to their right and to their left. Their positioning has evolved and their abilities have as well, but the play to the right always existed and always will. Ozzie Smith influenced a generation of SSs to emphasize style in their movements, but, ultimately, the balls go where they go and if you don't catch them, the league figures that out.
As for UZR...it's not looking for plays that "look" hard..it's looking for plays that are statistically more rare. Its leading assumptions are frequently wrong, it doesn't account for the team cooperation involved in defense, it doesn't account for positioning, it doesn't account for scorer biases, and it doesn't account for the fact that statistically rare plays are rare events and need to be treated with rare-event statistical methods and not linearly. It's a bad system, but it's the best bad system we had for a long time that was based on the fielder-in-isolation model. I preferred team-based results-oriented metrics like Win Shares and my own marginal defensive ratings because they were more stable and did account for positioning and team cooperation (and ignored the possible biases that come from the scorer, for the most part), but even those approaches are bad compared to actually tracking the plays and the fielders' physical abilities in real time.
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