To escape the mental grind that is my life, I spent the wee hours of Friday morning sorting through baseball stats on espn.com. The goal was to compare the defense of Carlos Gomez and Torii Hunter. I wanted to look at the fancy stats (zone rating & range factor) that tell me how good these players really are defensively. I did this because Torii has long been considered one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball and the Twins were bound to miss his glove when he bolted for the Angels. I just wanted to see if this was true. Well, here's how they stack up, with their MLB rankings in parenthesis:
Holy cow!!! Carlos Gomez is super good. I guess this makes sense because he is so much faster than Torii; he has to be able to cover more ground and get to more balls. It's nice to know that the Twins have actually improved their center field defense. However, it seems at times that Gomez can be erratic, but these two statistics have to make up for it. Just to be sure, I checked his fielding percentage: .958 (last). Uh oh!!! He has made five errors in 36 games, which puts him on pace for 22.5 errors for the season. That would be 7.5 errors behind the American League record for errors made by an outfielder in a season. So, the question seems to be 'is Carlos Gomez actually good at defense?'. I would say yes because five errors really isn't that many especially when he gets to more balls than any center fielder in the major leagues. Hopefully, he will learn to chill out a little and keep the miscues to a minimum. And if he does, he could see himself taking a golden shower in defensive accolades as soon as the end of this season.
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