Team Defenses

[onejayhawk]

This is an overlooked area and we have some good resources here in the forum. We saw last postseason how far superior defense can take a middle of the pack offense. The Royals defense was so good that it was a shame their three headed bullpen struck out so many.

To kick things off, here is Fangraph's contribution.

Team 2015 Proj Z Score 2014 UZR Z Score Change, Z
Orioles 34 1.6 55 1.7 0
Royals 34 1.7 61 1.9 -0.2
Rays 29 1.4 7 0.2 1.2
Yankees 29 1.4 4 0.1 1.3
Cardinals 24 1.1 29 0.9 0.3
Dodgers 21 1 -8 -0.3 1.2
Reds 20 0.9 46 1.4 -0.5
Red Sox 19 0.8 49 1.5 -0.6
Nationals 17 0.7 -6 -0.2 0.9
Athletics 13 0.5 24 0.7 -0.2
Diamondbacks 10 0.4 -4 -0.1 0.5
Giants 7 0.2 3 0.1 0.1
Mariners 6 0.2 8 0.3 -0.1
Brewers 5 0.1 3 0.1 0
Rockies 5 0.1 -1 0 0.1
Blue Jays 1 -0.1 -7 -0.2 0.1
Cubs -1 -0.2 -6 -0.2 0
Rangers -2 -0.2 -7 -0.2 0
Braves -3 -0.3 35 1 -1.4
Marlins -4 -0.4 -3 -0.1 -0.3
Angels -7 -0.5 26 0.8 -1.3
Pirates -8 -0.6 -40 -1.2 0.7
Tigers -9 -0.6 -48 -1.5 0.8
Phillies -12 -0.8 -22 -0.7 -0.1
Indians -13 -0.9 -72 -2.2 1.3
Mets -13 -0.9 7 0.2 -1.1
Padres -26 -1.5 9 0.3 -1.8
Twins -26 -1.5 -35 -1 -0.5
White Sox -26 -1.6 -39 -1.2 -0.4
Astros -35 -2 -64 -1.9 -0.1

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/examining-the-projected-team-defenses/

The three most improved: Yankees, Indians, Rays and Dodgers (tie).
Three biggest declines: Padres, Braves, Angels.

J

[Kevin Seitzer]

I might just hate that article. The Astros will not have the worst team defense in 2015. After a couple of years of being one of the worst teams in baseball defensively, we were finally close to the middle of the pack last year and should be improved next year.

[mjl]

Interesting. I assume you can't tell us, but what do you guys use instead of UZR? Fangraphs obviously had you as only better than the Indians last year.

[Kevin Seitzer]

Interesting. I assume you can't tell us, but what do you guys use instead of UZR?

Well, we know where every batted ball went, and how hard it was hit, so from that you can do quite a bit. UZR and DRS still rely on a human being subjectively giving their opinion about the difficulty of defensive plays. That has its strengths and weaknesses, many of which have were debated quite extensively in public sabermetrics a few years back. Then the teams hired up all the critics of UZR and DRS and now you don't hear much criticism of them from the sabermetric folks any more.

Fangraphs obviously had you as only better than the Indians last year.

That's if you look at UZR, which simply throws out all data from plays where the infield was shifted. Which team used far more infield shifts than any other team last year? If you look at DRS, which includes the shift plays, you will see a much different ranking. If you want some reality check to know which one to trust, team Defensive Efficiency is always a good metric (rate at which the team turned batted balls into outs). It's not perfect--teams like the Rockies will suffer in Defensive Efficiency because they play at altitude--but it's a pretty simple measure that is easy to understand and uses publicly verified data.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/le...fielding.shtml and sort by DefEff

[onejayhawk]

The Royals have a stellar reputation for defense and #2 in Runs above average and runs saved. Why are they down in the middle in terms of defensive efficiency? Seattle is total 43 runs above average (Rtot), but below average in runs saved (Rdrs). What's with that?

J

[Kevin Seitzer]

The Royals have a stellar reputation for defense and #2 in Runs above average and runs saved. Why are they down in the middle in terms of defensive efficiency? Seattle is total 43 runs above average (Rtot), but below average in runs saved (Rdrs). What's with that?

J

All defensive efficiency is, is the percentage of balls in play that a team turns into outs. That's the beauty of it. It's not a new concept. Bill James came up with it 30 years ago. It's incredibly simple both conceptually and in implementation (you could count it up from a box score), and it captures the bulk of what a team is trying to do defensively.

It has two main limitations. One is if the ballpark makes balls harder (or easier) to turn into outs. Think the thin air and wide outfield spaces of Coors Field or the Green Monster in Fenway making fly balls turn into hits more often than they might in another park. The other is that part of how easy or how hard it is to turn balls in play into outs is dependent on how hard they are hit, and the pitchers have a great deal of control over this.

It also doesn't include a few things that a team tries to do defensively that aren't associated with turning batted balls into outs, such as turning double plays, preventing advances on the bases, and various aspects of catcher defense. But at a team level those are generally small things compared to the overall task of turning batted balls into outs.

I'm not a fan of any of the public "advanced" defensive metrics that are out there. They are all making stupid mistakes even with the quality of data they have available to them. Rtot is the TotalZone system and Rdrs is the Defensive Runs Saved from Baseball Info Solutions. They differ because they use different methodologies. All of the "advanced" defensive metrics try to estimate how many batted balls "should" have been turned into outs by a typical fielder. Then they all compare that estimate to how many outs were actually made. So the main difference among all the "advanced" defensive metrics is in the method they use to estimate the chances of an out being made on any particular batted ball. But if they use information like someone watching a replay of the batted ball on TV and assigning a quality of contact or type of trajectory (e.g., flyball/line drive), or someone timing the hang time of a fly ball, they may also differ in these inputs, depending on who their data provider is (e.g., BIS, STATS, Inside Edge, MLBAM).

I'm not saying Defensive Efficiency is some magically perfect stat. What I'm saying is that it's about the most simple team defensive stat you could come up with, and it's incredibly transparent. If you want to construct a defensive metric that differs from it, you ought to be able to explain why your metric differs from it and why that means it's better rather than worse.

[chancellor]

I'm not saying Defensive Efficiency is some magically perfect stat. What I'm saying is that it's about the most simple team defensive stat you could come up with, and it's incredibly transparent. If you want to construct a defensive metric that differs from it, you ought to be able to explain why your metric differs from it and why that means it's better rather than worse.

Based on your experience and knowledge, were the Royals a better defensive team than their Defensive Efficiency indicates? It seems both the eye test and advanced defensive metrics say yes. DE says they're OK to good, but hardly great.

[Kevin Seitzer]

Based on your experience and knowledge, were the Royals a better defensive team than their Defensive Efficiency indicates? It seems both the eye test and advanced defensive metrics say yes. DE says they're OK to good, but hardly great.

The advanced defensive metrics that are out there just aren't very good. They are in general worse than Defensive Efficiency for evaluating team defense. The Royals certainly had very good outfield defense, but that's only about half of the defensive equation.

[onejayhawk]

The Royals home park is a hitting haven, except for HR. The infield is reputedly very fast. That may have something to do with it. I'm surprised someone is not already publishing a park adjusted version.

J

[Kevin Seitzer]

The Royals home park is a hitting haven, except for HR. The infield is reputedly very fast. That may have something to do with it. I'm surprised someone is not already publishing a park adjusted version.

J

James Click created a park-adjusted version he called Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency (PADE) when he was at Baseball Prospectus prior to going to the Rays to run their analytics department. BP still carries PADE since Click left, but I don't know if the formulas still work as sometimes the results seem weird.

[onejayhawk]

Which teams look to have significant changes for better or worse?

J

[Kevin Seitzer]

Here's a post that has the batting average allowed on ground balls. Which you can use, combined with the overall Defensive Efficiency info, to either calculate directly or in general to get an idea of how a team's outfield defense and infield defense performed.

http://www.detroittigertales.com/2015/01/tigers-infield-worst-in-mlb-in.html

[Fresno Bob]

I knew the Giants infield defense was good, didn't realize how good

[onejayhawk]

I knew the Giants infield defense was good, didn't realize how good

Ask the Royals. What gets me is the Dodgers. ElD would have it as one of the worst up the middle.

I wonder how much the count matters.

J

[onejayhawk]

I would immediately mistrust any metric that painted Hanley Ramirez and Dee Gordon as being excellent defenders. They were offset by perhaps the best 3B/1B defensive tandem around but, yeah, they weren't good.

That's why I wondered about the count. Two strike GB are likely softer hit than all the others.

J