Pat the Bat was VERY streaky and typically took June off. He also posted hitless streaks of 5 or more in ‘07 with 6, in ‘08 with 5, in ‘07 with 5 twice, in ‘00, ‘03 and ‘06 with 5 also.

I always like Pat Burrell… I thought they should resign him. I don’t know if I’m as critical of the Ibanez move especially with what Burrell initially wanted. The economic bottoming out makes this deal look a lot more lopsided than it is but so far, Raul looks like an upgrade.

My read of your interpretation is that Ibanez’s defensive performance is so far above what you would expect from him that he can’t possibly continue to play this well. The sample is an extreme outlier and that indicates that it’s bad.

I think that’s not quite right. I would say that his performance this year is well within the range that you could expect for 1 month of games given that he’s a -4.45 talent fielder. If you looked at all of his UZRs by month you would expect about 20% of those to be at or above his April 2009 performance. Because there is so much variation when looking at results from short time periods you should put more faith in his 6 years of UZR data than you do in his last month’s performance.