Previous posts concerning this topic:
Team Defense in Football and Baseball Betting #1
Role of Team Defense in Baseball and Football Betting #2
Baseball and Football Betting: Team Defense #3

What is Zone Rating in Sport Betting?

The main sport channels, ESPN, shows the Zone Rating as percentage, which was evaluated by STATS Inc., of balls on the player’s field in his typical defensive zone. STATS Inc. is one of the leading providers of the statistical information in the spheres of professional sport and sport competitions, which has been tracing the position of every particular ball in every game since 1990.

To define the ZR, the field is mentally decided into 20 different zones. Every player in turn is responsible for every ball in his zone. And he doesn’t responsible for any balls outside his zone. In fact, it is the definition for ZR as a parameter. To concrete, it is a field, which has the shape of a heart (as the hearts in a deck of cards) and is cut into many thin pieces. The bottom of the heart is home plate. And every player on the field is responsible for all the fitlding balls, which were thrown in his zone.

The main prerequisite of a zone is that a fielder is considered to be responsible only for the moment, in which he really can struggle (i.e. write “out” into his account). ZR just counts the total number of the outs, which were registered by a fielder and the total number of possibilities (hits) in his zone. Just in case if you want to know the average ZR for all the teams it’s about 85 percent. At the average the MLB players will make outs in 85% of 100 hits in their “zone”.

Zone Rating Can Be Very Useful When Bet on Football or Baseball

You should know some things about ZR. At the beginning of a game not all the balls are counted. The balls that were thrown lower than the line, higher than the middle or in nobody’s (i.e. not assigned) zone, for example, are ignored. If ZR has a problem, it is only that the zones are very thin and the players with “good hands” receive an advantage over the players with “good radius of action”. But STATS obviously made the smaller zones purposefully in order to reduce the possibility of the players, so they can’t “encroach” into the zone of their neighbours.

Even in this case, ZR gives a head start to fielding percentage in amount of 100 points, as a criterion for evaluating the defensive ability. Unlike fielding percentage, there are no subjective elements in ZR, as ZR clearly defines the obligations (of zone), every fielder of which is supposed to be responsible. When we choose fielding percentage, we allow the referees to be responsible for the mistakes, as their opinions may be different from each other (that is why at least one of them will be mistaken) when they interpret the same game situation.