Indians' middle defense
by Alex
Loyal reader David commented on a recent post:
While I appreciate Belliard's unorthodox positioning, his propensity for so-called "spectacular" plays may be a result of Sammy Sosa Syndrome--namely, being so unskilled that even the most simple of plays for a normal players looks like a Herculean effort. While his hitting has been extremely surprising in a good way, let's not kid ourselves about his defense.
Even more disappointing is Omar Vizquel. His decline in the field is easily visible to see just as a fan, but when you goto the numbers you see how marked it is. Omar is nowhere close to the defensive superstar he once was. He is 21st in the majors in Range Factor (behind even Derek Jeter, yuck), and 16th in Zone Rating. These make Omar a below-average defender. Sad, I know.
Casey Blake is merely average at best, Ben Broussard is above average, and our outfield is below average, likely because Matt Lawton is terrible in the field. As for Derek Lowe, he is 51st in the majors in Defense Independent ERA this season. This would suggest that while Boston's defense has hurt his statistics this year, he still hasn't impressed. Interestingly, he is sandwiched between Mike Hampton and Javier Vazquez--but to me this shows that those two pitchers are overrated rather than that Derek Lowe isn't as bad as we all think. You also mention Westbrook, who is 40th in DIPS ERA. While one might conclude therefore that since his ERA is so impressive with an average DIPS ERA that the Indians defense is the reason, one also cannot discount luck--the most important aspect in any baseball statistic basically. Westbrook has been lucky, very, very lucky, and is also having his career (read: peak performance) year. I strongly doubt he can continue or even improve upon his 2004 performance in the future.
One more thing: Travis Hafner and his .330 season-adjusted EqA is approximately performing the same as Jim Thome did during his peak years with the Indians (1995-2002) in which Thome had an average EqA of .325.
David, I am sorry to inform you that you have been misled. The Cleveland press, led by Paul Hoynes, Roger Brown, and especially the Indians' announcers would have you believe that the Indians middle infield defense is good. Sadly, they are not. Ronnie Belliard does not deserve any award for his defense by a long shot. He is 11th in the majors in Range Factor ([putouts + assists]/innings) and 13th in the MLB in Zone Rating (The percentage of balls fielded by a player in his typical defensive "zone," as measured by STATS, Inc.). All these statistics are ranked only among "qualified" players, so a guy who plays one inning at a position won't screw up the rankings--essentially only starting players.They are good up the middle with Vizquel and Belliard (who should be considered for a Gold Glove, IMO). Victor isn't great behind the plate but he isn't clueless. They aren't the Twins in the outfield, but, again, they aren't terrible. Casey is fairly strong in the hot corner and whoever plays first base night to night does fine. Look at a guy like Westbrook, who is a groundball pitcher. If he didn't have a solid defense behind him, he would not be having the kind of season he is (for an example of this, see Derek Lowe).
While I appreciate Belliard's unorthodox positioning, his propensity for so-called "spectacular" plays may be a result of Sammy Sosa Syndrome--namely, being so unskilled that even the most simple of plays for a normal players looks like a Herculean effort. While his hitting has been extremely surprising in a good way, let's not kid ourselves about his defense.
Even more disappointing is Omar Vizquel. His decline in the field is easily visible to see just as a fan, but when you goto the numbers you see how marked it is. Omar is nowhere close to the defensive superstar he once was. He is 21st in the majors in Range Factor (behind even Derek Jeter, yuck), and 16th in Zone Rating. These make Omar a below-average defender. Sad, I know.
Casey Blake is merely average at best, Ben Broussard is above average, and our outfield is below average, likely because Matt Lawton is terrible in the field. As for Derek Lowe, he is 51st in the majors in Defense Independent ERA this season. This would suggest that while Boston's defense has hurt his statistics this year, he still hasn't impressed. Interestingly, he is sandwiched between Mike Hampton and Javier Vazquez--but to me this shows that those two pitchers are overrated rather than that Derek Lowe isn't as bad as we all think. You also mention Westbrook, who is 40th in DIPS ERA. While one might conclude therefore that since his ERA is so impressive with an average DIPS ERA that the Indians defense is the reason, one also cannot discount luck--the most important aspect in any baseball statistic basically. Westbrook has been lucky, very, very lucky, and is also having his career (read: peak performance) year. I strongly doubt he can continue or even improve upon his 2004 performance in the future.
One more thing: Travis Hafner and his .330 season-adjusted EqA is approximately performing the same as Jim Thome did during his peak years with the Indians (1995-2002) in which Thome had an average EqA of .325.
11 Comments:
Belliard makes it SEEM as though he is a good fielder, because (a) when he gets to the ball, he usually makes a clean play, and (b) he makes his fair share of impressive-looking plays. The problem with (a) is that he has poor range; he doesn't GET to the ball as often as your average 2B does... plenty of balls that appear to be clean base hits when Ronnie is on the field will go as ground outs, infield singles, or errors when a better defensive 2B is on the field (ironically, great fielders, in getting to more balls, are often able to knock a ball down or keep it from reaching the outfield even without being able to get it over to 1st base... these plays are often scored as errors - the curse of a great defenseman, since he did a good thing by keeping a ball in the infield that someone like, say, Ronnie Belliard would never touch... the moral of the story being: don't judge based on errors or fielding percentage; they're crap). A good way of evaluating Belliard's defense would be: good hands, poor range.
You say Belliard seems like a good fielder but that his numbers don't indicate it. But numbers don't directly result in wins and losses. Play in the field does. And thus far, I would argue that the Indians can credit more wins to their defense than they can losses (a perfect example, the Seattle game a while back in which Belliard single-handedly won the game with a great catch; conversely, I can't think of a game recently in which the Tribe lost because of a defensive misplay). If numbers meant anything substantial, we could just have every team play the equivalent of 162 games and then figure out the standings based on the Pythagorean theorem of baseball (and in that case, both Sox teams would be in first place right now).
You point to Jeter and his horrible range factor, but the fact is, he gets the job done. And that is why the Yankees, year after year, are among the best teams in baseball.
I will certainly give you that the Indians were very poor defensively earlier in the year. Omar, in particular, was horrid. But, this is a different team now. Look at the plays these guys are making. And, coincidentally, look at the results: two games behind the Twins.
I don't need the media to confirm to me what I see with my eyes every night: the Indians are a very solid team defensively.
And if you're still set on numbers, I think you at least need to acknowledge that, despite the recent advances, there is still no truly good way to measure defensive ability with stats.
What intangibles, exactly, do Ronnie Belliard and Derek Jeter possess, and how does it help them play defense? I guess you're thinking of a supposed "knack" for making big plays. I don't really think such a knack exists in a player like Jeter, who lets more ground balls get by him than any shortstop in the American League, but I'm willing to suppose, for the sake of this argument, that Jeter (or Belliard) was indeed able to "step up" his defense in the clutch.
The thing is: stats like Zone Rating and Range Factor represent factual records of the outcomes of all balls in play, exactly as they occurred. They count Jeter's great plays right along with his bad ones. Just because he may turn one spectacular play in a hundred, it doesn't mean the other 99 plays don't count. Jeter's Range Factor and Zone Rating come out bad because he genrally IS bad.
No one is suggesting that you should or could decide the outcome of an at-bat, a game, or a pennant race based solely on the stats that came before. Part of the beauty of baseball is that anything can happen; the fun is in finding out what will happen, and that's why we watch every single one of the games (even the so-called number-crunching fans). The fact that we just don't know what's going to happen, however, doesn't make it worthless to know the statistics. It's nice to be able to say "Well, So-and-so is hitting .333, so I guess he has about a 1 in 3 chance of getting a hit right here".
Here's something you can't argue with, becaue it's true and you can look it up (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/def_eff2004.html): the Indians, as a team, have converted 68.10% of balls in play into outs so far in 2004. That's the third-worst such percentage in the major leagues right now. Only the Royals and Diamondbacks have played poorer defense.
You can try to defend the Tribe's defense all you want, but how do you explain the fact that 27 of the other 29 ballclubs have been better at turning balls in play into outs?
No, the Indians' defense is most certainly NOT the reason they are doing so well this year, as you suggest. The reason they are doing so well this year is two rather specific strengths: the offense, which has scored more runs than any in baseball, and the top three starting pitchers, who have been among the best in the AL.
My eyes tell me a different story about the Indians' defense than what your eyes tell you. But when you're going over the season so far, and your eyes tell you one thing and the numbers tell you another, you should consider the possibility that your eyes simply tell you what you want to believe.
And this applies to the Indians specifically in the case of their bullpen, which, as we all know, was getting shelled earlier in the year. This alone skews the numbers of our pitching staff and makes them look worse than they are. It also results in more balls put in play that were not turned into outs because the balls were hit so hard to places where they could not be turned in to outs, like down the line or off the wall.
Defensive efficiency is a stat that is horribly flawed at best and absolutely worthless at worst.
I see you are not familiar with the famous research of Voros McCracken, who demonstarted a few years ago that pitchers exert no control over balls in play; that is, one year a given pitcher may see a higher-than-average number of balls in play drop for hits, while the next year the opposite may be true -- there is no correlation from year to year, nor has any one pitcher ever shown the ability to maintain a "balls in play aaverage" that was either higher or lower than the league average over the span of a career. The only thing that does have an effect on the percentage of BIP that drop for hits is the quality of the defense. If my explanation is hard to follow, check out McCracken's original article, published on Baseball Prospectus (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=878).
Hard as it may be to believe, it's supported by a hundred years' worth of data. It also means that Defensive Efficiency cannot be skewed by the pitching staff, however bad. The Indians' bullpen was so horrible in the beginning of the year that a great many more balls were indeed put in play, but the percentage of those that dropped for hits was not affected by the suckiness of the bullpen - only by the ability of the defense to turn them into outs.
On a side note, the outgrowth of McCracken's shocking research has mostly been the gradual realization that the only things a pitcher really can control are his strikeout rate, his walk rate, his home run rate, and his groundball/flyball ratio. All a pitcher can do to prevent hits is to try to allow fewer balls in play; that's why it's so important for a pitcher to get strikeouts to be effective.
The Indians' bullpen was so horrible in the beginning of the year that a great many more balls were indeed put in play, but the percentage of those that dropped for hits was not affected by the suckiness of the bullpen - only by the ability of the defense to turn them into outs.This, you simply cannot prove. And as I mentioned previously, logic tells us that no matter how good a defense is, they aren't going to be able to make outs of balls off the wall, balls smoked down the foul lines, balls lined into the gaps, etc.
I ask you, what stat account for this?
First, I should explain that I am not arguing against McCracken's theory that a pitcher cannot control hits on balls in play. The numbers obviously show that he is correct. However, there is no number that shows hits in play are completely dependent upon the defense. You are using McCracken's research to come to a conclusion that is not true.
Stats gurus attribute many things that they don't understand or that don't make sense to luck or chance. You choose to attribute clutch hitting to luck, because that stat don't make sense (by not being consistent from year to year, etc). But defense is something that is a huge component of the game, so you HAVE to figure out a way to quantify it.
I'm sorry to inform you, there is no dependable way to quantify defensive ability. What factors into whether or not a ball hit back up the middle is turned into an out? You've got to consider where the ball is hit, how hard it is hit, the angle that it leaves the bat, where the defense is positioned, etc. Depending on these factors and others, the ball might be flagged down by a shortstop who is playing more towards second base because of a shift put on by the manager. Or the ball might tick off the pitcher's glove and ricochet to the shortstop. Or, the shorstop may be that good that he is able to get to the ball before it gets by whereas many other shortstops would not have made that play. There are too many things going on to say that if the ball is in play, it is the same as any other ball in play.
McCracken does address this:
Some people will argue that despite all the numbers, the above can't be true because it means that a screaming line drive hit into the right-center-field gap is as likely to be an out as a pop-up to the shortstop. This point deserves further discussion. One of the critical points of misunderstanding is the issue of "blame." When a ball gets crushed into the gap in right-center, some think I'm saying that the defense deserves the blame, not the pitcher. When I counter with "Neither the pitcher nor defense is to blame, it's the batter who is to blame," I lose some people.I am satisifed with his response to that criticism. I think you and others who put any stock in defensive efficiency stats have simply chosen to ignore it.
As you watch a game, don't you get the sense of whether a ball "should" be caught based on how hard it was hit and the location? If the ball's not caught you wonder where the 2nd baseman was (those of you who remember Baerga's days here know what I'm talking about). Ok, so maybe I watch a lot of games.
Another thing in Belliard's favor that isn't quantified in this stat is his ability to turn the double play. He has a quick turn, doesn't bail (ala Robbie Alomar) and has a strong arm. Making 2 outs when others would make one certainly improves his relative standing. He also plays "smart" going far into right field to get a Sizemore relay throw that he almost turned into a out (on the CWS winning run a week or two ago). That's probably "intangible".
A complete aside, did anyone else see that Garrett Anderson was hit-by-pitch for the first time in like 5 years? That's blows my mind.
are you insane? I remember that play, and Belliard blew that play bigtime.
He went so far into right field that he had to jump in the air to get Sizemore's throw, and then make an off balance throw from too far out to get the runner at home.
sheesh.
Post a Comment
« Home