David Pinto at Baseball Musings is continuing to publish the results of his Probabilistic Model of Range. He has churned out the positional data for shortstops and second basemen. Carlos Guillen looks decent, and Omar Infante doesn’t look too bad.

              
Guillen       Infante

3597          2710

Act. Outs         490           305

Pred. Outs     496.37        319.00

Act. DER         .136          .113

Pred. DER        .138          .118

Among their peers, Guillen was in the top third (and substantially ahead of Edgar Renteria, the guy the Tigers were looking to sign and displace Guillen) while Infante was right about in the middle. The table was compiled only of players that had 1000 BIP.

Interestingly in Guillen’s case, he had the highest actual DER of all shortstops. Also, his predicted DER of .138 was among the highest so for some reason the balls hit to/near him were more fieldable than most other players. I’m hesitant to make the leap that the Tigers pitchers manage to induce a high amount of weakly hit balls (at least to shortstop), but I don’t have any other explanations either.

While Infante’s numbers don’t really do much for me, it was only his first season with significant playing time at second. He’s also young and probably still has room to grow where it comes to positioning and familiarity with opposing hitters.

Over the course of a full season I’m assuming 4400 BIP for short and 4000 BIP) the two combine to be 28 outs below their predicted range.

Over the course of a full season (assuming 4400 BIP as a full season) the two combine to be 31 outs below their predicted range

I’m curious to see what Pinto’s numbers will show for the Tigers’ 3rd base situation, but I’m not sure that Brandon Inge will have the 1000 BIP to qualify.

For more background on the PMR, check out David’s other posts here and here.

UPDATE: Pinto just posted the centerfield ratings and he has further validated his system: Alex Sanchez rannks near the bottom.

Other Stuff
-I did some updating over on the sidebar. Added are some new Detroit sports links, and I cleaned up some defunct sites. I also removed the section for the 2004 preview and anchored a couple of interesting/highlight type items. So far that includes my interview with Dombrowski and a table that has Tigers’ salaries for 2005 (so far).

-Ordonez watch: Apparently the Cubs are interested and Ordonez will work out for them in California. Will he actually work out or is Boras trying to force the Tigers hand? Or is Magglio just trying to get somebody else to offer up multiple years like the Tigers have done. Did Boras hold off on these workouts all along so that he could get maximum value for his other slugging outfielders (Drew and Beltran) by effectively shrinking the talent pool knowing that he could always get a desperate team to cough up big bucks and years on the eve of spring training? It’s stuff like this that hurts my head but it is par for the course with Scott Boras. The level of suspicion that surrounds any Boras negotiation is almost comical, but well earned.