Over at THT Sean Smith has been going through old data and putting together historic defensive stats. You can go download the spreadsheet that has all the info.
I have always felt like Griffey was a great defender but I was young and he dove in CF so maybe I had overvalued his play over the years. Looking at him now and the stats we have currently he looks horrible. I went through and grabbed what Sean had on Griffey.
| player | pos | Chances | Runs | year |
| grifk002 | cf | 454 | -12 | 1989 |
| grifk002 | cf | 491 | -4 | 1990 |
| grifk002 | cf | 526 | -2 | 1991 |
| grifk002 | cf | 522 | -7 | 1992 |
| grifk002 | cf | 477 | -12 | 1993 |
| grifk002 | cf | 352 | -9 | 1994 |
| grifk002 | cf | 280 | 2 | 1995 |
| grifk002 | cf | 560 | 5 | 1996 |
| grifk002 | cf | 581 | 6 | 1997 |
| grifk002 | cf | 615 | 6 | 1998 |
| grifk002 | cf | 547 | 8 | 2000 |
| grifk002 | cf | 307 | -10 | 2001 |
| grifk002 | cf | 153 | -11 | 2002 |
| grifk002 | cf | 143 | -5 | 2003 |
| grifk002 | cf | 267 | -9 | 2004 |
| grifk002 | cf | 452 | -23 | 2005 |
| grifk002 | cf | 375 | -17 | 2006 |
| grifk002 | rf | 422 | 0 |
2007 |
When you look over the numbers you'll see that he wasn't that good when he was young. Probably still pretty rough because of lack of experience. He was a fine CF for around 5 yrs from 1995 to 2000 and then injuries caught up with him and killed his abilities to play defense.
I think this jives pretty well with how I believe he actually was. Am I way off? I'm a little surprised he wasn't a better defender when he was younger and that he was still decent around 2000.
PS. I do like how I can just copy excel stuff in and it looks good now.
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