ST. LOUIS, Mo. – Rawlings Sporting Goods Company, Inc., has announced the winners of the Rawlings Platinum Glove and Team Defense Awards for the 2021 season. St. Louis Cardinals’ third baseman Nolan Arenado won a Rawlings Platinum Glove Award, presented by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). The St. Louis Cardinals were announced as recipients of the Rawlings Team Defense Award. The Awards were revealed in a special broadcast that aired earlier in the evening on MLB Network, co-hosted by Greg Amsinger, Yonder Alonso and Harold Reynolds.
This marks the fifth consecutive Rawlings Platinum Glove Award for Arenado. Arenado is the first player to secure five Platinum Glove Awards and the first infielder to begin a career with nine consecutive Rawlings Gold Glove Awards.
The Rawlings Platinum Glove Award winners are determined by combining votes based on an adjusted SABR Defensive Index (SDI) for each of the nine Rawlings Gold Glove Award winners in each League and from baseball fan votes worldwide. Voting for the Rawlings Platinum Glove Award began at the conclusion of the ‘2021 Rawlings Gold Glove Award Announcement Show’ that aired on ESPN’s ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ on Sunday and ended on Wednesday. Fans took to Rawlings.com to voice who they thought
was the best defender in each League.
The Rawlings Team Award, in its second year, utilizes an SDI that draws on and aggregates two types of existing defensive metrics: those derived from batted ball location-based data and those collected from play-by-play accounts. SDI utilizes MLBAM’s Statcast, Sports Information Solutions data, and STATS, LLC data as well as traditional statistics with advanced analysis.
Both the Rawlings Platinum and Team Defense Awards will be presented to Arenado and the Cardinals, respectively, at a game to take place early in the 2022 regular season.
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