UZR Is the New VORP

Next Big Thing is MLB FanHouse's look at emerging teams, trends and stars in 2009.

Since Moneyball was published over five years ago, the public has slowly started to change the way it looks at baseball statistics. On-base percentage and slugging percentage have slowly crept into the wider consciousness of baseball fans changing the way "production" is valued.

Still, only one sabermetric stat has taken hold beyond the traditional rate stats like OBP and SLG. Value Over Replacement Player, or VORP, is Baseball Prospectus's attempt to quantify how many runs a player is worth at the plate over the typical Triple-A call-up, and it's about as mainstream as "new school" baseball stats get. Sure, it's publicly maligned by old baseball writers, but that only validates it's importance. The average fan might not know xFIP or WARP3, but chances are good that they know what VORP is, even if they think it's voodoo.

This year, I've got a gut feeling that we're going to see a new stat join VORP in the "semi-maintstream" category. It's Mitchel Lichtman's Ultimate Zone Rating, or UZR. Lichtman, a consultant for the Cardinals, has calculated UZR as a way of measuring defense for several years now, but this year it's finally going to be made widely available to the public on FanGraphs.

Since the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 in part by adding the slick-fielding Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz to their lineup of sluggers, baseball fans have become more and more interested with quantifying defense. There are several good metrics available to the public. David Pinto publishes his Probabilistic Model of Range at the end of every season and John Dewan's plus/minus ratings are available in the Bill James Handbook and in the Fielding Bible every year.

That's what's important about FanGraphs grabbing UZR this year. Instead of being available only at the end of the year, they say they're planning on updating it at least weekly throughout the season. Now there's no need to wonder all season how a player with a good fielding percentage but poor range factors will fare in the advanced metrics. The output of the stat is also straightforward: runs above or below average in the field.

Being available and in a form easy for most fans to digest, get ready to hear a lot about UZR this year. Bloggers will be using it to drive discussion all year and you know once that happens, it's only a matter of time until someone like Richard Griffin makes a "UZR is UZLess to me!" crack when a reader asks him about it in a mailbag.

There's never been any such thing as a perfect fielding metric and UZR doesn't claim to be, but it is one of the best and we all benefit as baseball fans now that it's widely available. Because of that, don't expect this to be the last you'll hear about it this year.