AL Gold Glove Winners

Another year of Gold Glove winners, another year of stupid decisions. I never understood the phenomenon of giving a Gold Glove award to a guy known for hitting. A Gold Glove is supposed to go to the best defensive player at his position in each league. There are players in the league specifically because of their defensive value but they are never rewarded. Now that we have stats that tell us more about defensive that errors, we can see if each winner was the person who actually deserved the award. I will use UZR (ultimate zone rating) which is the number of runs above or below average a fielder is in both range runs and error runs combined (a score of 0.0 is MLB average). Lets look at the winners and who should have won (bolded players are the correct decisions).

P - Mark Buerhle
C - Joe Mauer
1B - Mark Teixeira (-3.7). Robbed: Kendry Morales (4.9)
2B - Placido Polanco (11.4)
SS - Derek Jeter (6.6). Robbed: Elvis Andrus (10.7)
3B - Evan Longoria (18.5)
OF - Ichiro Suzuki (10.5). Robbed: Franklin Gutierrez (29.1)
OF - Torii Hunter (-1.4). Robbed: Ryan Sweeney (24.0)
OF - Adam Jones (-4.7). Robbed: Carl Crawford (17.6)

There is no data for pitchers and catchers and winners would be in line with what I thought just from watching games. As for the other winners, it is obvious the voters look at history and hitting and not for what the award is supposed to be about. Franklin Gutierrez was by far the best defensive player in the Major Leagues and the fact that he didn't win was an absolute travesty. Also, living in NY you would have thought Teixeira was the best 1B ever but according to these stats, he isn't even average. I wonder if his "greatness" was because of how bad the previous 1B (Giambi) was on defense? Oh well, tomorrow I can take apart the NL winners.