Best & Worst

Jeff Sackman, who is a contributor at Brew Crew Ball, wrote a pair of articles for The Baseball Analysts. Those articles are a statistical analysis that purports to give The Best Minor League Defenders and The Worst Minor League Defenders.

Jeff explains how he arrived at his conclusions:

Through its website, Minor League Baseball has made available a play-by-play log of every game played in the affiliated minors, complete with some batted-ball information. A person with enough time, desire, and misdirected energy can track every ball that was pitched, hit, or caught by a bush leaguer in 2006.

For pitching and hitting, there's MinorLeagueSplits.com. We can turn our attention, then, to fielding. Using a statistic called Range, I came up with plus/minus ratings for every 2B, 3B, SS, and OF in the minors.

For more explanation, go to the articles.

The ratings include some Rattlers or ex-Rattlers.

In the best category:
Shortstop, Oswaldo Navarro (#2)
Centrfield, Brent Johnson (#3)

In the other category:
Shortstop, Jeff Dominguez (#7)
Left Field/Right Field, Shin-soo Choo (#2)

It's worth a look if you are into these kinds of things.