At the 2024 KBO League Golden Glove Awards held on the 13th, the audience burst into exclamation as the result of the vote for the first baseman came out. The winner of this year's Golden Glove Awards was LG Austin with 132 points and NC Davidson with 46 home runs. It was unfamiliar that the "home run king" did not win the Golden Glove, but the margin of the vote was larger than expected with 110 votes. Some said, "Isn't the value of the home run king too denigrated?" Davidson is second to Austin in terms of overall indicators for this season. He lost the RBI king, but in the OPS, which combines on-base plus slugging percentage, he led Austin in the third place in the league with 1.003. In the home run category, he overwhelmingly beat second place (Kim Do-young) by eight points. Analysts say that the team is not close to losing to Austin.토토사이트
The failure to win the title of "Hit King" (0.360), SSG Eredia, also spells disaster. This season, Eredia was the batting champion with the highest batting average since Lee Jung-hoo (0.360), the batting champion in the 2021 season. While most of the players in the league had received the Golden Glove award, Eredia was lagging behind Samsung's Koo Ja-wook, KT's Rojas, and Lotte's Reyes in the outfield. The home run king has failed to wear the Golden Glove four times, and the batting champion eight times. It is the first time that a home run king and a batting champion have failed to win the title at the same time.
The Golden Glove is determined by votes from media officials in charge of professional baseball. Although the measure takes into account professionalism and impact, not a few people said that the vote will turn into a popularity vote for the player they like (not objective skills). As statistical techniques to measure baseball player's ability further develop, such controversy intensifies. Rather than simply considering the high batting average or home run, a growing trend is now to evaluate players based on sophisticated indicators such as winning contribution (WAR) and scoring ability (wRC+) compared to replacement players.
According to the war and wRC+ calculated by the KBO, Herredia and Davidson are somewhat sagging compared to the winners. WAR shows how many more wins a team has earned than the average player in the league, and wRC+ shows how much more points a player has scored when the league average is set to 100. If the wRC+ exceeds 115, it is interpreted that the player is above the league average, and if the wRC+ exceeds 140, he or she has remarkable scoring ability. Austin seemed to be slightly inferior to Davidson in batting performance, but he was ahead of Davidson in the WAR and wRC+ by 5.5 to 4.69, and 146.2 to 141.1 respectively. Herredia is also inferior to the two outfielder winners in the WAR (5.50), including 6.17 Koo Ja-wook and 6.55 Rojas. However, he is taller than Reyes (4.84) and also ahead of Reyes (133.3) in the wRC+ (138.1). Analysts say that Reyes highly evaluated his record for the most hits in a season, but critics say that he or she reflects his preference other than his performance and performance. Even though Kiwoom Choi Joo-hwan, third baseman Noh Si-hwan, and shortstop Park Seung-wook had one vote each for the first baseman, some said, "We will vote based on fans." A baseball official said, "As the results of the vote are released, we need to consider supplementary measures to ensure fairness and professionalism in voting."