Angels and Angles in the Outfield

(No EFL update, but maybe this will tide you over in the meantime?)

Last night the NHS baseball program hosted a movie at their field. There was an inflatable screen down the right field line, complimentary snacks, and a baseball classic being played for all to enjoy – Angels in the Outfield. Filmed in 1994, it is about an awful California Angels team that, through supernatural intervention (namely, as I am sure you can guess, angels) is able to start winning games at an incredible pace until they win the pennant. They go from worst to first by the end of the movie, winning the pennant on the last out of the season.

The movie opens with the Angels LFer and CFer colliding on a routine fly ball hit about 250 feet. The ball was a can of corn, but the outfielders are so inept they end up crashing into each other and the ball rolls about 10 feet away from them, and the batter runs around the bases for an inside the park home run. It’s an important scene that sets up just how valuable the immortal angels are to the mortal Angels turnaround.

We know this because the very first play on which an angel aids an Angel is a long drive to left field. The LFer is playing about 50 feet behind the SS (not sure why, besides for dramatic effect) and when the ball is hit he starts running towards the outfield fence. All of a sudden, just as he dives (which is going to clearly be too short and too late) and angel swoops down, grabs him under the armpits, and lifts him so that to the naked eye it seems as though he dives about 100 feet – all in the air – reaching out to make the catch at the last second. The Angels win, the crowd erupts, the manager (who the game before was ejected for fighting his own pitcher) looks on dumbfounded, and the announcer says (tongue-in-cheek), “that was miraculous.”

No one can see the angels except for one young boy (who had prayed for God to help the Angels) so everyone just assumes that all of sudden the Angels became otherworldly players overnight. It is cheesy, but delightful for a summer night.

But it got me thinking about the plays MLB OFers make, and how incredible they seem to the naked eye. Thanks to the technology that exists today, there are metrics that actually measure how amazing (or not) a catch actually is. Some catches look amazing, but were only amazing because the OFer got a horrible read on the hit, or they took a lazy approach to the ball. And some are so incredible you have to watch them several times just to make sure it actually happened. So how do we know which OFers are good and which are, perhaps, miraculously lucky?

One of the metrics used to determine if an OFer is an incredible OFer is called Outs Above Average. Here is how it is explained: Outs Above Average (OAA) is the cumulative effect of all individual Catch Probability plays a fielder has been credited or debited with, making it a range-based metric of fielding skill that accounts for the number of plays made and the difficulty of them. For example, a fielder who catches a 25% Catch Probability play gets +.75; one who fails to make the play gets -.25.

Baseball Savant collects the data and presents it in ways that allow people like me, not a savant, to measure just how good (or not) and OFer really is. Here is there top 20 in terms of OFers who catch more difficult balls than their peers:

What do we learn from this list? Well, not a lot, but it is interesting to look at, right? For instance, Robles is probably going to have his EFL rating increase sometime in the next update or two. He leads the MLB in OOA, and everyone else on the list (in the top 20) has an EFL rating over 2. Canberra leads leads the EFL with 2 players on this list, but if we included all the players in between 20 and 52 (where the first Cheese appears) Peshastin has 4 more for a total of 5.

While the Pears may not have Angels in the Outfield, they certainly have angles in the outfield!

There are other lists of interest at Baseball Savant that I’ll visit over the next couple of days. Until then, keep praying for miracles (unless your Peshastin) in the outfield.