More on Gold Gloves

So the Gold Gloves winners were announced yesterday. The Fielding Bible awards have also been announced; the full results are here. I thought I'd look at how biased the Gold Gloves are towards guys who are good offensively. Here is the average line for this year's GG winners:

.296 BA, 20 HR, 87 RBI, 114 OPS+

Only one guy with a BA of under .276 won, and that was Andruw Jones; I think we can consider him an exception, as he has 368 career HR. Only three winners (Polanco, Cabrera, Suzuki) had less fewer than 10 HR, and those guys all hit over .300. There were zero winners that were below average hitters this year, as well as in their career (according to OPS+).

Let's contrast those numbers with the average line of the Fielding Bible Award winners:

.279 BA, 16 HR, 72 RBI, 104 OPS+

Seven winners had BAs under .276, and five hit fewer than 10 homers (John McDonald had 1 HR). Only one of those under 10 HR guys hit over .300 (Ichiro). And five winners have OPS+s of under 100 for both 2007 and their career (McDonald, Inge, Feliz, Crisp, Molina). And if you're still not convinced that these awards ignore hitting, Nick Punto (.210/.291/.271, 52 OPS+) came in second in the AL.

Among Fielding Bible Award winners, the average winner is comparable offensively to Casey Blake. For the Gold Glove winners, the comparison becomes Carlos Lee or Miguel Tejada. So yeah, I'd say there's a slight bias toward good hitters.

As more people start thinking like this, and the BBWAA keeps doing things like this, these awards are going to continue to lose credibility. Either they're going to have to revamp the system so the voters actually have a clue, or other honors like BP's Internet Baseball Awards and the Fielding Bible Awards are going to become more prominent. I hope.