We're bad at everything

One of the things that constantly amazes me during the baseball season is how the Pirates almost always seem to be awful at everything. Bad offense, bad pitching, bad defense, everything. Today, the Hardball Times did their yearly off-season analysis of outfield arms. As you'd expect, the results were not pretty for Pirate fans. Xavier Nady clocked in with the fifth worse right field arm last year and Nate McLouth displayed the fifth worse centerfield arm. Surprisingly, Jason Bay rated the eighth best left-field arm, somehow clocking in slightly above average. All-in-all, though, it's pretty clear that outfield arm strength is yet another category in which the Pirates are severely lacking.

Please do me one favor, and don't rail against Bay's rating without reading the methodology first. John Walsh (the author) looked at five key situations for outfielders and measured a kill rate and a hold rate for each outfielder compared to the average. There are a number of possible explanations for Bay's average rating. We know people tend to try and take an extra base on his weak arm and he often throws those runners out, which is obvious in his 23 outfield assists in the past two seasons. He also plays left field, which means that even on his arm runners are going to be careful bolting from second to third (if you look, most of the left fielders have similar ratings and I think it's probably for that very reason). And finally, since only five situations are measured, it's possible that lots of the airmailed throws we remember are on plays that the author decided were unlikely to have a different outcome no matter how good the throw. No defensive metric is perfect and I'm not asking you believe that Bay has a good arm from the outfield. I'm simply providing food for thought here.