Gold Glove Awards Steeped in Tradition and Absurdity

1957 was a good year. Bernard Malamud published "The Assistant," Dr. Seuss published "The Cat In The Hat," and James Gould Cozzens published "By Love Possessed," which inspired Dwight MacDonald to write the best book review since Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper. Falco was born, and Ella Fitzgerald collaborated with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on some of her finest recordings. Most important of all, the first Gold Gloves were awarded, beginning a tradition of absurdity that has carried on to the present day.

There are two important and related things to know about Gold Glove awards. The first is that rather than awards, they are permanent incumbencies, more like seats in gerrymandered congressional districts than like Oscars. Once you have won the thing, you will continue to win it — forever, unto death. Bernie Williams, in the best of times a noodle-armed and famously inattentive center fielder, won four straight Gold Glove awards. Ken Griffey Jr. won ten straight, largely in the batter's box. Greg Maddux has won the National League Gold Glove for pitchers every year save one since 1990, and he still doesn't have more of them than Jim Kaat.

This leads naturally to the second important thing about Gold Gloves, which is that they are usually not given for fine fielding, but for having once had a reputation for fine fielding, which is something entirely different. The most notorious example is the award Rafael Palmeiro won in 1999 for playing 28 games at first base, but there are plenty of others. Derek Jeter, who isn't all that good a shortstop, has won three Gold Gloves in a row largely because of a play he made in 2001 against the A's and another he made in 2004 against the Red Sox. For all I know he'll still be winning them five years from now.

In short, Gold Gloves are not to be taken particularly seriously. Neither should the voting — even by the standards of public baseball polls — for the new All-Time Rawlings Gold Glove Team, the ballot for which was announced at Times Square yesterday to mild fanfare, with Hall of Famers like Ozzie Smith showing up to lend a bit of credibility to the affair. Aside from the misleading title (the team will be selected only from among those who have played during the Gold Glove era, which omits two-thirds of the history of professional baseball), the whole project is problematic because, delightfully, it reproduces exactly the mistakes that have historically plagued the award. A "congress of historians and experts" was convened to choose 50 players, from among whom the public could select one player at each position by voting at a Web site. Voters managed to pick out players who have won a lot of Gold Gloves and some well-known contemporary players. Thus the final ballot omits tremendous defensive shortstops like Rey Sanchez and Garry Templeton while listing Jeter as one of the six nominated shortstops. Derek Jeter wasn't even one of the six best defensive shortstops to play in New York City in the last ten years.

This isn't, by itself, offensive at all, as polls of this type are typically ridiculous, and indignant offense requires a certain amount of surprise. Britons once rated Diana Spencer above Shakespeare, Darwin, and Newton among their country's most important progeny. (Up with "Candle in the Wind," down with calculus.) The 1999 fanled voting for baseball's All-Century Team (up with Nolan Ryan, down with Lefty Grove) was so embarrassing that the organizers had to add Honus Wagner, Stan Musial, and Christy Mathewson, among others, by fiat. Doubtless something similarly silly, like Don Mattingly being elected the greatest defensive first baseman of all time, will happen with this poll, and it will come down to the same fault—a, supposedly expert screening panel failing to screen expertly. Present the public with a choice between the People's Princess and the evolution guy, or between Donnie Baseball and Wes Parker, and any consequent silliness is on you.

The problem, though, is that this ballot reinforces the idea that defense is a matter of reputation and faith, that it is something magical and immune to normal, rational thought.

No one would think to leave Alex Rodriguez off the short ballot for a spot on the All-Time Silver Slugger Team, but that's basically what's been done at various spots on this ballot. It shows how poorly even experts and historians understand defense on a broad scale. This certainly isn't because these people don't know baseball — people like Sparky Anderson and Dusty Baker knew more about defense by the time they were out of high school than I'll know if I live to be 120. It's just because there aren't reliable, comprehensive defensive statistics. If there were a similar paucity of offensive records, and people went mainly by reputation, famous plays, and sketchy impressions, Al Oliver would be considered one of the all-time great hitters. No one, after all, hit the ball harder or looked better doing it.

If you're one of those who find all this a bit irksome, given the patent importance of defense in baseball, take the All-Time Rawlings Gold Glove Team for what it is — a fun public relations gimmick — and invest some money in a good, insightful book on fielding like "The Fielding Bible" by John Dewan, or time on reading something like Chris Dial's articles on historical defense at baseballthinkfactory.org/files/dialed in. No one has all the answers, and no one's ever going to have them, but those who have put the time into systematically asking the right questions are worth your attention. And if the Gold Glove voting can spur a bit of interest there, it will just be another of the fine legacies of 1957, up there with the birth of Siouxsie Sioux and well above Mr. O'Malley's odious decision.

tmarchman@nysun.com