Tom Tango is running his scouting report by the fans once again. I’ll let him describe it:

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondel White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

You become the scout. Forget what UZR is telling you. Forget what Baseball Tonight is telling you. Forget what Baseball America’s survey is telling you (they are telling you Derek Jeter is the best fielding shortstop in the AL …what!? … wait, forget what I’m telling you). This is your chance to give your two cents.

fielding (especially of the infield variety) is probably my favorite aspect of the game. It’s interesting how so many different skills (reaction time, quickness, hands, throwing strength/accuracy just to name a few) interact to create overall fielding ability. The simplistic approaches that have been embraced by the mainstream (like errors and fielding percentage) leave out large, significant chunks of this skill set. Of course, fans who watch the games know that a fielder isn’t defined by his ability to not make errors — there’s so much more to it. Hopefully, the concept continues to grow and more and more people participate.

Last year, most Padres players only had 10-15 ballots filled out. Let’s get that number a lot higher this year! And needless to say, it’ll be fun to see where different players rank when all is said and done (and perhaps how how the fan rankings compare to something like UZR).