And fielding percentage is a bad metric, but for over 100 years,
nobody questioned it and nobody came up with anything else.
So Bill James, who again is a genius who may not know advanced math, but
basically we talked about Bill with runs created.
But in 1997 I believe, he thought about fielding.
And he said gosh, you look at fielding percentage.
It doesn't make that much sense to evaluate fielders by fielding percentage.
Consider a short stop, okay?
So his fielding percentage, based on the 100 balls he had a chance at.
Well if he never moved, balls are to the left of him,
balls are to the right of him, and basically those become hits, which really
hurt the pitcher's earn run average, and certainly hurt the team's win loss record.
So Bill James said, how can I come up with a better measure for
how good a fielder is and we'll focus on short stops here in this [INAUDIBLE].
Well Bill James came up with range factor.