Why would that matter? You stated, quite clearly, that it’s not only hard to use stats to measure defensive ability, but that “there is no way to really gauge who is better by stats.” I disagree, and so do plenty of other people.
See, this is just silly and uncalled-for. You’re presenting yourself as no less of an expert than anyone else in this thread. You’re just as confident in your own analysis of Cano’s defensive ability and hitting prowess as i am. In fact, you present your own observations as definitive, while i have at least attempted to take into account multiple different measures of defensive capability.
I know it might feed your prejudices to believe that i’m simply a Yankee-hater, but my point in this thread has nothing to do with how i feel about the Yankees, or about Cano. I happen to like Cano a lot. He’s a great player, and i was happy to see him have a good year.
One problem here is that that we’re trying to differentiate players who are at the very top of their profession. You seem, in your silly whining, to be assuming that i’m somehow down on Cano, or that i’m arguing that he’s not very good. Nothing could be further from the truth. As RickJay noted earlier in the thread, the very fact that he’s a regular position player on a Major League ballclub means that he’s one of the 500 best in the whole world at his job. Any discussion we have about the relative merits of MLB players has to concede, at the very outset, that every single one of them is a fantastic baseball player.
Not only that, but they have, as a group, been getting better over time. As scientist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his essay “Why No One Hits .400 Any More,” the standard deviation of MLB hitting averages has declined over the past century, while the mean of those hitting averages has remained roughly the same, at about .260. Gould argues that the professionalization of the sport—changes in the game and in training regimes and selection procedures and the talent pool—means that the average quality of MLB players has increased over time. As he puts it, when we look at MLB players now, we see that “the distance between ordinary (kept at .260) and best has decreased. In short, no more .400 hitters. Ironically, the disappearance of .400 hitters is a sign of improvement, not decline.”
Furthermore, in this particular discussion, we’re talking about two pretty well-matched players, both of whom play at one of the most demanding defensive positions in the game, and who each play on strong, successful clubs. For this reason, the difference between the two is likely to be even smaller than normal. We’re not comparing the defensive abilities of Ozzie Smith and Pablo Sandoval here.
But just because all MLB players are really fucking good doesn’t mean that we can’t work out, at some level, which ones are better than others. The metrics might not always be perfect, and there’s often some wiggle room in the stats, especially when it comes to defense, but they can tell us something, and i certainly think that they are at least as reliable as your very subjective sense of what Robinson Cano looks like when he makes a nice play up the middle.
Anyway, while these general baseball threads have no rules about content, i don’t want to submerge the general discussion with this one issue, so i’m going stop now. We’ll just have to disagree about the relative strength of Cano’s fielding.