Few awards in baseball are as overlooked—and disrespected—as the Gold Glove.
Its critics will claim that the award is meaningless, that defense cannot be evaluated by statistics and that the voting, by-and-large, is nothing more than a glorified popularity contest.
To be sure, past winners have an advantage over those who have never one before. History has proven that voters tend to favor those who have won before over a player looking for his first Gold Glove, even if the numbers show the newcomer having a better season than the old guard.
Defense is an incredibly difficult thing to evaluate, and when you take advanced defensive metrics into account, it’s easy to become more confused than you were when you only looked at things like error totals and fielding percentage.
That said, there’s value to be found in that new school of defensive grading, and chances are that those tasked with voting for the award see that as well.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how we see the voting playing out when this season’s Gold Glove Award recipients are announced.
*Unless otherwise noted, all statistics courtesy of FanGraphs and are current through games of Sept. 14.