I love advanced baseball statistics. I'll admit that at the outset. I recognize, however, that TV networks do not have some sort of duty to educate casual, traditional fans regarding the virtues of advanced statistics. As much as networks get blamed for perpetuating myths regarding the value of, say, pitcher wins, you can't blame them too much for providing their audience with the information it wants.
Virtually anybody who follows baseball closely knows that fielding percentage is a terrible statistic. It measures nothing more than the percentage of plays in which a team (or player) makes an out rather than an error. The stat tells very little about a player's defensive ability, other than that the player doesn't make a ton of obvious mistakes. It doesn't tell you how often the player does the spectacular. It doesn't penalize sloth-like players who can't ever reach relatively easy fly balls--but don't bungle the catch when they actually make it in time. It doesn't punish players who take terrible defensive positions. It doesn't reflect the situations where players decide they'd rather not make a drive or crash into the wall in chasing after a ball. Whether a given play is a "hit" or an "error" is an arbitrary judgment that varies tremendously depending on the official scorer. Willy Mays turned a lot hits into outs. Manny Ramirez, on the other hand, raised a lot of batting averages even when he didn't commit errors.
Fielding percentage is quite obviously a terrible way to measure defensive performance. But, you ask, what are the alternatives? After all, most advanced stats (like plus/minus or UZR) are pretty controversial and depend on all sorts of measurements that casual fans don't see.
There is, however, a better stat that is easy to understand. Frankly, I'm very puzzled that it hasn't been adopted already. That is defensive efficiency. Defensive efficiency is just the percentage of the time that a fielder turns a ball in play into an out. When calculating defensive efficiency, we don't ask whether a defender should have made a play. We just ask whether he did. Now, on any given play, defensive efficiency might not tell you much. No defender is going to catch a screaming line drive to the gap. But, over time, defensive efficiency is a much better stat than fielding percentage because it covers more things that we want to know about how well a person defends his position. Players get credit for making players that they "shouldn't"; they also get punished for not making plays that don't involve obvious screw-ups but that most defenders would make.
Defensive efficiency is easy to understand and vastly superior to fielding percentage. So, why don't we use it more? Your guess is as good as mine.
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