Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Gold Glovin' Every Minute of It

The manager reminds the players they have a ways to go.

From "Dodgers, Red Sox boast 6 Gold Glovers" (AP/ESPN.com):

Clayton Kershaw, Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier became the first trio of Los Angeles Dodgers to win NL Gold Gloves in the same year, and Adrian Gonzalez, Dustin Pedroia and Jacoby Ellsbury became the first three Red Sox in 32 seasons to win the AL honor together.

Kershaw became a first-time winner at pitcher when the awards were announced Tuesday. Ethier earned his first Gold Glove in the outfield and Kemp regained the NL award he also earned in 2009.

Kemp certainly was no surprise, and Kershaw certainly wasn't unexpected (earlier at SoSG: Clayton Kershaw, Gold Glover?). But Ethier? A quick check shows his UZR went from -16.5 last year to 5.3 this year. Pretty amazing. Congrats to all three!

3 comments:

Nostradamus said...

Haven't forgotten about you boys. You made us proud. We'll celebrate more when you bring home that other well-deserved hardware (wink-wink-nudge-nudge).

Wicks said...

The UZR confuses me and I looked up the UZR for both Kemp and Dre this morning. So a positive UZR is good and a negative one is bad? I figured it would be the opposite.

Nostradamus said...

I'm not surprised that he improved, but I'm a little surprised it was that much. I'd say that the defense, on a whole, was improved significantly this year.