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Can Rick Hague Stick at Shortstop?

April 21, 2010

Thanks to Baseball America's Aaron Fitt, the college news of the day is that Rice shortstop Rick Hague is moving off of shortstop. He had a dreadful night Tuesday in the field, pushing his error total up to 22 and his fielding percentage below .900.

This is not the kind of message a player wants to be sending six weeks out from the amateur draft.

So, how bad is it? Based on fielding percentage, it couldn't get much worse. But it's 2010, and we should know better than that. For the last year or so, we've been developing play-by-play-based defensive metrics for college baseball that, at least at the macro level, have more to tell us.

Ultimately, the measure of a shortstop is how many runs he saves in the field. Yes, 22 errors are 22 plays that someone else may have made. But as the argument usually goes: Is he making plays other guys wouldn't? Would other shortstops even get to those balls he is bobbling, or would they skid past a diving Jeter?

This year, the results couldn't be more counterintuitive. Of course, the sample size is small, but even properly regressing for the amount of data available, Hague has been about five runs above average.

The one thing that our metric doesn't account for is the value of extra bases resulting from throwing errors. Depending on how many of Hague's misplays end up in the stands, he may well have given back some of those runs. (This is more difficult to figure out than it sounds--it's easy to count up how many bases resulted from Hague's errors, but we'd need to compare it to league average, which would require hundreds more calculations.)

At the very least, these numbers should give us pause. Even with an alarming number of misplays, this metric indicates that Hague has been better than average with the glove.

His performance the last two years leaves room for hope, as well. In 2008, he was about five runs below average, and in 2009, about two runs below average. (Both figures are regressed based on playing time.) Not great, but hardly disastrous.

Overall, we've got a player who has been only a bit worse than neutral over the course of his college career. Despite the hoopla right now, there's evidence he's getting better. He's no Tyler Bortnick, but let's not be too rash in knocking him down draft boards.