Good field/no hit players: who actually wants them?

Not the St. Louis Cardinals.  Last week they made that clear by changing shortstops from Pete Kozma to Jhonny Peralta.  There were additional issues.

Pete Kozma 9/14/13 By Johnmaxmena2
(creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
 via Wikimedia Commons

Thursday, October 24, 2013  Choking in the field. What could be more obvious?

Pete Kozma choked playing shortstop.  There's no other interpretation.  In game one of the Major Baseball League (MBL) finals, a.k.a., the World Series, the St. Louis shortstop missed two balls
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That may have influenced St. Louis management, including concern about how Kozma was perceived by teammates.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013  Jhonny Peralta: will vigilante players punish him?

Peralta served a 50 game suspension during the 2013 season and lost $1.6 of his $6 million salary.  Peralta has just signed a free agent deal with the St. Louis Cardinals for fours years $53 million ... It looks like Peralta made a good business decision.
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Supposedly Peralta's fielding has been improving with age.  I don't know how that works.  It just adds to my lack of confidence in ever evolving fielding metrics.

Peralta can hit, Kozma cannot.  Kozma can field, Peralta not nearly so well.  St. Louis switched to the good hitting shortstop even though he is tainted by scandal and older.  In 2014 Peralta will be 32, Kozma 26.

Adam Everett was the darling of fielding fanatics a few years ago.  They couldn't invoke him often enough to denigrate Derek Jeter, their poster boy for good hit/no field shortstops.  Everett is 36 years old, three years younger than Jeter.  Everett has not played since 2011: 34 games, 67 plate appearances (PA) for Cleveland.  He played enough in 2005 and 2006 for Houston to qualify for the lead in batting average (BA).  Unfortunately, his BA were .248 and .239; OPS+ 70 and 64.  Ouch.  Houston sent him to Minnesota for 2008: 48 games, OPS+ 62.  Then Detroit tried him for 118 games in 2009: OPS+ 61; 31 games in 2010: OPS+ 27.

For all the talk about all the runs that really good fielders can save teams, the teams do not seem to be buying it.  Maybe the teams are wrong.  Or maybe the traditional approach to judging good fielding is like the definition of obscenity by the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it.

Or maybe the trade-off is judged too great by teams that they pretty much always side with hitting whenever possible.  On the other hand most shortstops who qualified for BA in 2013 had OPS+ below 100.  Shortstop by far is the position where teams are willing to use below average hitters ... just not too far below.