Fielding Symposium Part III: Fielding as Undervalued

Let me start my rejoinder by saying that there are three central premises on which John and I are in agreement:

1. It is tougher to quantify fielding than hitting.  I firmly agree with this sentiment: In fact, this is why I believe that this new camera technology is revolutionary. It makes it easier to quantify something that is very difficult to quantify. Of course, it will still be more difficult to quantify than hitting. I don’t object to this.
2. There are more factors to account for in fielding than hitting. This is true for the reasons John explains.
3. Fielding is more interactive than hitting. Again, this is true and this is a reason it is more difficult to quantify fielding than hitting.

Fielding Symposium Part I: Baseball’s Next Statistical Revolution?

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis chronicles Oakland A’s general manger Billy Beane’s use of unconventional statistics (sabermetrics, using baseball-speak) to field a competitive team despite Oakland’s small budget.  The A’s found that statistics like on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging percentage were undervalued on the open-market, allowing Beane to sign and trade for better players at a lower cost. Due to the popularity of Moneyball and the increased popularity of sabermetrics more generally, these statistics are not nearly as undervalued as they used to be. So, what’s a general manager like Beane to do now? What methods of evaluating players are currently undervalued?