That is so funny. PADMY. I see him do that so much.

You can't get grit without diving.

It's just another example of Michael Young's flawless leadership qualities.

What I see him do is hit .300 each year with 200 hits. Errors are so overrated. Stop your hating on him.

Loren, you need to go to Range Factor class.

CJ
I suggest you learn the game of baseball. Hitting .300w/200 hitsw/100 runs and 70-100 rbi is far more important than sometimes meaningless errors. Ask alphonso Soriano. He.s really not the hitter MY is but has made many $$$ hitting.

I think Loren has found the incorrect little corner of Rangers cyberspace. Appears a place where fielding is a secondary concern and circumstantial and context based numbers like batting average and RBIs still get cited in defense of above average but not elite baseball players.

Tre & CJ
.300/100 rbi/90 runs/200 hits--20 errors VS .240/8 hr/50 rbi/70 runs--10 errors. I know who I'm choosing and if you choose the.240 guy then you're ignorant about baseball.

Right on Tre!

PADMY is more a reflection of poor range than errors. It would take a real A-hole of an official scorekeeper to score an error on most dives.

And even though errors do tend to be overvalued in examining defense, its still tells more about a players' defense than Runs Scored/RBIs tell about a player's offense.

I have made a quick PADMY picture to add to the discussion too. http://s1244.photobucket.com/albums/gg572/KeystoneHeavy/?action=view&current=s080915_rangers1.jpg

@Loren

Stop with the straw man. Noone is saying that MY is a bad hitter. Hell, noone is even claiming that he makes a huge amount of errors. What we are saying is that he is a crappy defender. According to UZR his lack of errors has saved 20 runs over his career (at all positions). Unfortunately, his range has cost 62. And he has also lost 8 runs on being below average on double plays. +/- stats have never liked him either.

Well lets see here. 62 runs plus 8=70 allowed-20 saved=50 runs allowed. And hes played maybe 13 seasons or more. lets see here at 150 games per season times 13 seasons is 1950 games played. that means every 39 games hes given up a run on an error. That with was he does offensively FAR outweighs that And that is allowing that UZR EVEN means anything. Real baseball fans realize thand some of you are duped with these meaningless stats. I fearyou have fallen into their lair and im sorry about that. Watch a game and forget about Joey's incessant need to filter your mind with these utter meaningless made up stats. 1 run by your own stats every 39 games.--yeah--he's horrible-shoot him. leadership/.300 avg/plays 4 positions-Your right-means nothing.

Ok Loren,

1) Again with the strawman! Nobody, and I saw NOBODY is going to tell you that MY sucks on offense. ANd nobody is going to say that the runs he generates on offense don't outnumber the runs he allows on defense. ALL we are saying is that he sucks on defense.

2) UZR is the best defensive statistic out there. But what I really ind interesting is that you apparently think that both UZR and errors are overrated. Tell me, how do you measure defense? And what is you beef with UZR? Sure its not perfect, but its better than any other defensive metric out there.

3) His UZR IS bad. Very bad in fact. Hell, he is of the worst shortstops in terms of UZR since 2002.

4) He may play multiple positions, but what does it matter if he doesn't play any of them well? And how do you determine who is a leader? If Young had the same numbers and personality but was on the Astros would people call him a leader? If he had the same personality on this team but hit .250 would he be called a leader?

5) I am a fan of much more advanced statistics than Joey tends to use on this site (though I'm sure hes aware of them).

And the very fact that you use batting average to determine offensive value and nothing else shows how stuck you are in the dark ages.

Loren, who among anyone here has said Young should be shot or that he's worthless to this team? He's just horrible at defense at this stage of his career. He's very useful to the team right now and I don't think anyone denies that. But his bad defensive numbers are nothing to sniff at.

Is his leadership a good thing to have? Yes, though I agree with many people here and think that his leadership is overstated by some in the media. But it's definitely worth something. Hitting 300 definitely means something (though I do think his significant drop in power is an area of concern) and I hope he can keep it up.

As for playing 4 positions being something of value, it definitely is worth something. I mean, sure he sucks at defense nowadays but it's all about tradeoffs. Sure a journeyman infielder might be better defensively than MY, but the dropoff defensively from Beltre to MY is not as big as the offensive production from Beltre to a journeyman infielder. Plus, having a DH who can play all 4 infield positions really gives you a lot of flexibility when you need to rest guys. Having that in a DH allows you to make roster moves you couldn't otherwise.

My concern about MY is overexposing him defensively. Last year was a return to the old MY's batting average (and also on base percentage. It was .380 last year, the second best mark of his career) and I believe part of the reason his numbers went back up was because he wasn't in the field every day.

In the end, the Rangers are at their best though, when MY is not in the field but is at the DH spot. The reason is simply that he's a plus-batter and a negative-defender so why not minimize the time he has to spend where he's not good anymore.

What I think most of your anger is at how you feel his contributions get seemingly marginalized by the audience here. Understand it's not that we here don't think he's a good player, we just find it hilarious how the local media goes out of their way to provide cover for the guy or overstate his leadership. The entire trade saga last year was a great example of overstatement of MY's worth as he was sour faced that the Rangers brought in a better defender than him and wanted him to be the DH. At that time, MY was pissed, NOT a team player and demanded to be traded because he felt entitled. And several media members demanded the Rangers trade MY even at their own detriment.

Do I think it was inexcusable for MY to demand a trade? No. He had been here for a ton of years and felt like he had been pushed around for younger players instead of being given the respect he felt he deserved. The issue many here had was how the media portrayed him as a great team guy while at the same time he was demanding the team bend to his will and not moving to where the team felt he would best serve the team's needs.

I think, and I'm guilty of it too, that the BBTiA community DOES overreact to MY's warts more than it should. I think that it's in direct relationship to how much the rest of the local baseball community ignores his warts. Hype aversion is very common. I think in your posts we can see the very same hype aversion coming full circle.

So if we take a little too much time with our comedic rantings about MY's poor range, please forgive us as we are all reactive creatures. We also are a community with our own set of inside jokes and PADMY is one of them. Because it's somewhat of a running gag, we overstate it. We also get tired of hearing about how Napoli hits homers because he's MY's puppy dog and other such overstatements of MY's leadership skills. So we probably make too many "Leadership'd" jokes. The local media just makes MY out to be perfect and we are tired of that characterization so we overreact the other way.

But don't for a minute think we don't want him on the team. How many other players stuck it through the lean years of the Rangers? When Dirk threw out the first pitch of Game 3 it was never even a question as to who should catch the ball. We all knew it would be MY because he IS the face of the franchise and has experienced similar growth in becoming the leader of his team. He owns, what, like a dozen team records for hitting? I love the production this guy gives!

No one is arguing that hitting isn't more important than fielding when it comes to determining a player's value. Even Elvis, who is an absolute defensive wizard and pedestrian offensively, had an oWAR greater than dWAR (for those interested, according to baseball-reference.com, Elvis's oWAR was 2.6 and his dWAR was 0.9). I think the effect of defense IS understated by WAR, but even if I thought his dWAR was twice that, his hitting and baserunning would STILL be more important.

What I would argue though is that MY's poor defense is statistically significant. Ignoring stats for a moment, the PADMY jokes are a result of the eye-test that tells us that MY's range has long since left him. Stats back up what my eyes see. His dWAR was -0.9 last year, and given that was only with him going into the field for 91 games, that means if he had played the whole season at one of the defensive positions, he would have cost the team 2-3 wins on the defensive side (for those who wonder where I pull 2-3 wins, consider that Beltre's dWAR was +1.3 (thus the dropoff defensively was at least -2.2 wins on defense) and Betlre's oWAR was 0.5 higher than than MY and doesn't take into account the fact that I believe MY's offensive output would have suffered if he was an everyday fielder).

My post (that was too long and you probably didn't read) gets down to one point. I think using MY to spell other players defensively keeps both MY and the rest of the infielders fresh is a good strategy that nets you somewhere between 2-4 more wins depending upon how much you believe defense and regular rest help a team stay at peak performance. But I'd like to see MY in the field no more than 70 games in a season if it's my call. Kinsler, Beltre, and Elvis all were in the 20 in dWAR while MY was number 602 of 616 players even though he played in significantly less games in the field than most of the other players at the bottom of this list. The defensive dropoff from those 3 to MY is quite steep as you go from people who are the best in the league to one of the worst.

At what point does the value keeping other players fresh get outweighed by the loss of defensive value that MY represents? I'm not sure, but I do know that to completely disregard his HORRIBLE defensive record via multple stats would be a mistake. Equally so, it would be a mistake to disregard his offensive value, leadership, and the ability to play multiple positions. Just put players in a chance to succeed. That's all that I ask.

Man that was good, but that wore me out.

Actually, I don't believe he is using a "straw man" argument, which is characterizing your opposition in absurdly exaggerated or simplistic terms and then easily refuting that position. What he's doing I think is closer to "red herring," which is failing to stick to the issue at hand. Regardless of whether Mike Young is a great hitter, he is a poor defender, and that was the point originally. Those two things can be talked about separately - you can be a crap defender and a great hitter at the same time.

From WIKI: "A red herring is a clue or piece of information which is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual issue."

I bet you correct people on facebook too dont you?

Cmdr Splice good post, love the "Why cant we all get along angle"

Not that this excuses Young, but let's not forget that Jeter, an almost sure hall-of-famer, is a pretty bad shortstop, too. Just goes to show you how undervalued defense is. So if Young were to accumulate 1000 more hits (which doesn't seem terribly likely but is still possible), he might be a hall-of-famer, in spite of having defensive numbers that started out average and got worse by the year.

Defense not highly regarded by the HOF electorate or not, it helps win games. Having arguably the best 2B/SS/3B combo in the game helps immensely when you have pitchers that induce lots of ground balls. And that's why, as much as I love MY, the Rangers shouldn't put him in the field every day. He's a very good choice for the DH slot, with occasional spots in the field to help give other guys a break now and then.

@ Loren (aka Evan Grant?):

Sorry, but anyone who uses batting average and number of hits as a standard for judging production immediately loses all credibility. Further and as has been stated above, this was about MY's poor defense - and not about his overall value.

@utb: batting average and number of hits aren't bad statistics to use for judging production, but they're not as good as others (wOBA, OBP, OPS, etc.). Using BA isn't nearly as bad an idea as using errors to judge defensive value, RBIs to judge offensive value, or wins to judge pitching value. So I wouldn't say they lose all credibility. Instead, I would point them to a link about those stats, explaining what they are and why they're better.

Fangraphs has a decent read on them:
OBP
OPS
wOBA

But yes, obviously this was about Young's defensive shortcomings. I don't think anyone was saying Young was ineffective on offense.

I think this tread has just about run its course, but I'd like to make one more point about defensive abilities:

To my knowledge, the current metrics tend to view each play in a vaccum. If a ball wiggles past MY's glove, it essentially adds a baserunner to the equation of created runs probability but doesn't take into account the pitcher having to go to the stretch, throw more pitches, and face another batter in the lineup.

To me, the real value in efficient defense is getting yours off the field in a timely manner and running the opposing teams pitcher back out there before his butt has a chance to warm the bench.

@WWJDD?

You're right, Red Herring is a much better term for what he/she was doing. In my defense, he/she was misrepresenting the opposing arguement- I wasn't that far out of touch.

that awkward moment when a funny post about MY defense gets real...really quick.

This seems to be as good a place and time as any to bring up something that may or may not be relevant.
(Now that I've muddied this post sufficiently, lets press on...)
Having watched baseball for the better part of 50 years, I've lived through a time when batting averages, ERA's and errors were the only stats we could use to measure a player's worth to his team.
In the past 20 or so years, SABR numbers have been integrated into a player's profile. At first (probably because I didn't understand them) I was a little befuddled by WARs, OBPs, OPSs and the like.
Yet as time rolled by and I gained a better (not total, just better) understanding of the SABR numbers, it became easier to gauge a player's worth to his club.
For me, however, it comes down to this: There's room in our wonderful game for both. If a player has a high batting average, there's a good chance he's going to have a high OPS and OBP. If a player has a respectable WAR, he's going to be a top tier player and ALL his numbers will reflect that.
Let's not get bogged down in so much minutiae that we forget the eye test: If a player gets lots of base hits and drives in a lot of runs and makes a lot of good plays in the field, I want him on my team.
Thank you for your time and we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Keystone - true dat. No worries - it was the English teacher in me coming out. I know it's annoying to be corrected like that. Sometimes I just can't help myself.

42 - I agree with you, too, although I suppose I'm older than most peeps on here and thus am probably biased. I don't think that citing BA or AVG or OBP makes a person's argument invalid. Those are real indicators of effectiveness in getting on base, and you can't score runs if you don't get on base, and you can't win games if you don't score runs. I like saber but I sometimes tire of people who act like they've reinvented baseball because they have 10 new saber stat ways to evaluate whether a player is effective or not.

This thread was much less funny than I hoped.

Even this guy thinks Michael Young's dives are terrible.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/741837-cristiano-ronaldo-real-madrid-superstars-5-worst-dives-video