Gold Glove awards not a good fit for NCAA

One of my least favorite things about Major League Baseball is coming to college.

The NCAA announced on Wednesday that Rawlings will begin giving Gold Glove awards in college baseball at the Division I, II and III levels.

If the collegiate Gold Gloves work the way the awards work in the pros, the Gold Gloves will continue to be awards based on hype, popularity and hitting ““ not defensive skill. This would be even worse at the collegiate level than the pros since there are so many more teams (284 instead of 30), less reliable statistical totals, and even less of a chance that those who vote on the award will have closely seen all of the fielders play.

The Gold Glove awards are supposed to be a measure of defensive prowess. Regularly, you’ll hear broadcasters and baseball people say a player is great defensively because he won a Gold Glove.

Yet, Rafael Palmeiro won the American League Gold Glove award at first base in 1999, even though he played only 28 games at first base, and 135 at designated hitter.

Derek Jeter has won three of the awards. I don’t have to use advanced statistics or logic here to show you that Jeter hasn’t deserved the award, and has won it only because he is extremely popular for his great hitting and postseason prowess.

Shortstops are expected to have a large range and make plays on balls hit anywhere near them. An easy statistic already exists for this ““ an assist is given to any player who fields a ball and throws it to someone else to make an out. Jeter was only sixth in assists among shortstops in the American League in 2006. He was also seventh in putouts (which measures catching fly balls or tagging a base or a runner for an out), ninth in double plays, and last in a slightly more advanced stat ““ range factor ““ among AL shortstops who played at least 70 games.

This is the award that is making its way to college baseball. Undoubtedly, the winners of the Gold Gloves will be the ones anointed as college baseball’s best defensive players, even though most of them will likely be known for their hitting, not their defense. Since there are almost 300 Division I teams, there will be great defenders that aren’t picked because the voters never saw them play.

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The Lexus Gauntlet has grown on me over the years. At first, I hated it, citing many things wrong with the formula of how to pick the winner, and wondering how many UCLA or USC fans really cared about a competition between sports other than football or men’s basketball.

I have heard from fans over the years who do care about the Lexus Gauntlet, and while it will never be a prize that has major value to the mainstream fan, it has developed a niche following.

That being said, the system could still use some changes. The way it is set up, it is easy to prematurely declare a winner. It is easy to look at UCLA’s 57.5 point total and determine that the Bruins have won, since the Lexus Gauntlet has only 110 points possible. What isn’t as obvious is that two of the teams that have earned points ““ men’s volleyball and women’s water polo ““ could still theoretically lose them if UCLA and USC meet in the postseason in those sports.

There are a few easy ways that the Lexus Gauntlet people, UCLA and USC could fix this.

1) Don’t award points to teams in the middle of a season. Right now, teams are given points after each UCLA-USC meeting, even if they have games left on the schedule. Stopping that would be easy.

2) Don’t count postseason games. The spirit of the Gauntlet was to make UCLA-USC games more meaningful than usual. But in the postseason, those games are already extremely important anyway. They could use the postseason meetings as a tiebreaker, though.

3) Make postseason games worth more points, outside of the points normally assigned to each sport. This would potentially increase the current total of 110 points, and thus make it obvious not to declare a winner at 57.5 points.

It’s not exactly rocket science.

E-mail Quiñonez at [email protected].