Somewhere in the inner recesses of the game engine there are digital bean counters and statisticians totaling up stats that are updated and displayed every night on the leader boards and team fielding pages, but many of these stats are totally hidden from us to help us evaluate our players (listed below). Unless a player happens to be among the league leaders, you don't really know how he's doing for some of the peripheral reasons we select players for our teams. Is he a good pinch-hitter? Does he ground into a high percentage of double plays? Does a pitcher give up a lot of extra bases through wild pitches, balks and stolen bases? So much I'd like to know...
But the one thing that should be available to help us be better managers, but isn't, are fielding statistics. Most experienced players will tell you that team defense is often the main difference between making the playoffs or not, and yet we still are in the dark if you happen to want to see if your middle infielders are making the plays they should, if your outfielders are cutting down baserunners, etc.
A historical baseball simulation I used to play would give you detailed individual fielding stats such as fielding pct, putouts, assists and range factors. Since that information is already being recorded behind the scenes and readily available for each set of games, would it be that hard to give us some better fielding statistics?
Batting:
INTENTIONAL WALKS
HIT BY PITCH
SACRIFICE HITS
GIDP
PINCH HIT BAT AVG
RUNSCREATED/27OUT
TOTAL AVERAGE
Pitching:
GAMES PITCHED
COMPLETE GAMES
GAMES FINISHED
SHUTOUTS
WILD PITCHES
BALKS
OPPONENT STEALS
OPPONENT SB PCT
PITCHER'S BAT AVG
PITCHER'S HRs
RUN SUPPORT
INHERITED SCORE %
Fielding:
PO: putouts
Ast: assists
OFAst: outfield assists
TC: total chances
DP: double plays
GDP: ground ball double plays
PB: passed balls
OSB: opponents' stolen bases
OCS: opponents' caught stealing
OSB%: opponents' stolen base percentage
AVG: fielding percentage
Team:
SQZ-ATT
H&R--ATT-ADV