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Shortstops and Defense



It’s been a fun season watching a young star take his first swings in the majors.  Before injuring himself a few game-weeks ago, Leyson Molina was batting .285 with 16 home runs and 42 RBI in 78 games.  But, his bat was slow in arriving from AAA.  While I was waiting for him to go on the tear that brought his average up 80 points, I was really interested in his defense.  What’s he going to be like at the big league level?  Is he average?  Is his 90 range going to get him a Gold Glove some day when he’s done maturing?  For the first time in a long time, I found myself reading box scores and paying close attention to his defense particularly.  I've never been one to comb the box scores for fielding excellence, but Molina changed that.  When he wasn't hitting I started to notice his fielding too, and he started his career ignominiously with that rare .000 fielding game at short: no putouts, no assists, no errors on zero chances.

He's since had several games with lots of chances, and it wasn't until his 67th chance that he made an error at the major league level.  At one point he had made errors in two consecutive games, but in the first game he hit a 2-run home run and in the second game he made a great play to end the inning.  The next morning he literally saved the run that turned out to be the difference in a 2-1 win over Robert's Anaheim team with another great play in the bottom of the 4th inning.  With two outs and runners at first and third, Molina took a step to his right and made a diving stab at a grounder, catching it with some of the white of the baseball sticking out of his glove like a snow cone.  He then popped up and made a perfect throw across his body to get the center fielder on a bang-bang play at first.  The man at third definitely would have scored and possibly the one from first.  If that ball had gotten through, at best the North Stars would have been looking at a 2-0 deficit with runners at first and second, but it could easily have also been runners at the corners or 3-0 with a runner on first or second.  Pretty cool.

Two games before his injury, he had a streak of 3 consecutive games where he made a plus play.  But, I’ve noticed by looking at the play-by-play that he has also made a lot of errors.  That got me thinking: how do defensive ratings correlate with errors, range factor, plus/minus plays, and fielding percentage?  To find out what the skinny is, I made a database of all the players who have led my team in games at shortstop each season and input their defensive stats and ratings.

Firstly, the first 5 to 9 seasons seem to have run on a different defensive engine.  Despite not being my best fielders, all of the first 9 seasons’ shortstops are in the top 16 seasons in terms of range factor, and 7 of the top 9 seasons in range factor are from that era.  Ignoring those seasons, my team’s best range factor has been 5.94 (season 24).  Ironically, this was from a guy with 84 range and I only have 6 seasons of players with worse range ratings.  The average of the 5 best range factor seasons is 5.75 and for the worst 5 it’s 4.96.  The median is 5.39 and the total average is 5.45, counting those wonky seasons.

For fielding percentage, the top 5 average is .987 and the bottom 5 average is .960, removing the first two seasons which were ruined by having a “fielding instructor” whose rating was a 3.  Yep, he had the worst fielding rating on the entire staff.  The median is .976 and the average is .974.

Looking at the ratings that these were based on, it’s hard to find a strong correlation between rating and result.  In seasons 22 and 23, Enrique Espinoza had identical ratings, yet he produced 25 errors, 9 plus plays, no minus plays, a .967 %, and 5.10 RF the first season and 13 errors, 5 plus plays, 3 minus plays, .982 %, and 5.37 RF the second season.  That hardly seems like the same player, let alone the same ratings.  For fielding percentage comparisons, that’s 2014 Asdrubal Cabrera turning into…2013 Asdrubal Cabrera.  Hmm.  Okay, I guess it happens.

But shouldn’t the best-ranged fielders have the best RF?  And shouldn’t the best-gloved fielders have the highest FP (accounting for arm, too)?  Not so much.  Throwing out obvious outliers (seasons 1 and 2, and the year I used a 2B at SS to see how he would do), the fielding percentages taken as groups do line up.

Glove Rating/Group Average
90+/.979
87-89/.976
84-86/.978
83/.971
0-82/.968

Here is the range version.
90+/5.32
86-89/5.54
85-85/5.30
82-83/5.11
0-81/5.16

Even throwing out the weird seasons 1-9, the best-rated defenders in terms of range are inferior to the ones that are just supposed to be above average.  Maybe there are too many moving parts to keep track of on each individual player.  Maybe having a really good defensive season is just as hard to repeat as having a really good offensive season.  By raw tools, Molina should be the 3rd-best defensive shortstop in team history.  But maybe he is, and we haven’t given him enough time to show us yet.  Check back in 15 seasons.

P.S. We’ve got to give a shout-out to season 26 of Kendry Marrero for his Gold Glove and for showing that raw tools do produce results!

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