How many athletes are sons of actors?

Sherman Oaks' Albino Rhino is the best defensive outfielder in baseball in 2025 & maybe the 3rd best player overall behind Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani:

Judging baseball outfielders’ defense is tough because you aren’t watching the outfielders, you are looking at the pitcher and hitter when, crack, the ball is rocketing outward 350 feet at 105 mph. Virtually all big league outfielders are willing to sacrifice their bodies to dive to make the catch … but did you see which ones got a good jump on the ball?

A half-century ago, left-fielder Bill Buckner was a fan favorite at Dodger Stadium because he sacrificed his body so much making countless diving catches. But as a mordant sportswriter pointed out at the time, if Buckner weren’t so slow, he wouldn’t have to dive for everything. (The Dodgers eventually realized they had an outfielder, Buckner, who couldn’t run and a third baseman, Steve Garvey, who couldn’t throw, so one of them ought to play first base. They installed Garvey at first and traded Buckner. It worked out well for the Dodgers.)

But footspeed isn’t everything at catching fly balls. For example, Lou Brock, the greatest base stealer before the late Rickey Henderson, was, despite his immense speed, a mediocre to poor defensive outfielder. It was not just that he made errors, but that he didn’t get to a lot of fly balls that an average major league outfielder would have gotten to.

I can identify with Brock’s problems figuring out where a fly ball is going. During my Little League years in right field, I never had a clue either. As Peter, Paul and Mary’s song “Right Field” observes: “Playing right field can be lonely and dull/Little Leagues never have lefties that pull.”

In contrast, while Andruw Jones of the Atlanta Braves was fast as a 20 year old centerfield prodigy, he never showed elite speed on offense: he never stole more than 27 bases or hit more than 8 triples in a season. For his career, he’s 136th all time in double plays grounded into. Those are Pretty Good numbers, but nothing amazing.

He put on a lot of poundage during the steroid era when he peaked with 51 homers in 2005. By the time he arrived at the Dodgers in 2008 at age 31, he had one of the worst seasons ever by a big money free agent. In one of my rare trips to Dodger Stadium in this century, I had the privilege of witnessing Jones strike out while falling down. And it wasn’t like a Jimmy “Toy Cannon” Wynn strikeout where he swings so hard that he falls down, it was more like your grandpa tottering over because the obesity and Alzheimer’s is kicking in and it’s time to take away his keys.

Yet, overall, the kid from Curacao may have been for his career the best defensive outfielder of all time. Only Kevin Kiermaer is close to Jones in Defensive Wins Above Replacement. Paul Blair of the Earl Weaver Orioles is third, and Willie Mays is fourth at about three-fourths of Jones’ production. The legendary Roberto Clemente has half Jones’ numbers. (Jones was 80% as productive on defense as Mays and Clemente combined!)

A big part of outfield defense is getting a good jump on the ball. Starting to run in the general direction of where the ball is hit is more important than waiting to run in the precise direction of where it will be going.

When I was a kid, the story was that on Mays’ famous over-the-head catch of Vic Wertz’s 420-foot blast in the first game of the 1954 World Series, Willie turned around and started running backward before Wertz even hit the ball, recognizing that it was a fat pitch that would be crushed.

Watching the primitive but impressive camera work on the surviving video, that doesn’t appear to be true:

So you don’t hear that tall tale as much anymore.

Still, Willie was obviously a baseball savant who was not only fast of foot, but also got great jumps on deep drives.

Apparently, Andruw was even more of a cognitive genius at instantly figuring out where a fly ball would go, rather like how Dennis Rodman could anticipate where a missed jump shot would carom to for him to rebound.

But all those defensive numbers had been estimated from fairly crude statistics.

Baseball statistics had gotten very good at measuring hitting and pitching, but defensive statistics long lagged. Now, we finally have excellent measures for how good outfielders are at running down balls hit in the air.

Based on direction and hang time, every flyball can now be estimated on a 0% to 99% scale for probability of being caught. Outfielders are evaluated for jump (how soon do they start running), efficiency of route run to where the ball is coming down, and footspeed.

So far this season …

Paywall here.