good hands was re apology for article in article c w zo xl eskimo com stevet eskimo com steven thornton writes stuff deleted mattingly scores badly on both counts he doesn t get to very many balls and he lets a lot of balls go through the fact that he looks smooth has great hands and makes few errors means nothing this is traditional brainless reliance on observations that can easily be misled like a lot of bad fielders mattingly actually makes himself look better by not having any range he s nowhere near as bad as steve garvey but that s not much of a compliment i agree with the flavor of this post but disagree with one specific argument that has great hands means nothing it seems to me that a first baseman s defensive value is not entirely or even primarily from his ability to field grounders or catch popups how many such chances does he get during a game many fewer than he gets chances to catch throws from b ss b and p i mean the total of these is much higher than grounder popup totals this implies to me that there is value in catching these throws well even if they are high up the line or in the dirt good hands are needed for such plays and thus have value i don t have any numbers for the relative number of occurences of these plays but i d guess that the values of these abilities are similar it s just like you don t judge catcher s defense primarily on how they field bunts and popups but not as marked i suppose michael
