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The High Boskage House Baseball-Analysis Web Site baseball team and player performance examined realistically and accurately |
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Overall Defense, by TeamThrough games as shown in the Tables. (You can also read a fuller discussion of this Table.) Team Defense, Briefly ExplainedThis list does not address the fielding ability of individual players: it deals with the defensive ability of each team as a whole. For a fuller discussion of defense and the implications of this table, refer to the page Defense And Its Implications elsewhere on this site. Team defense is very easily gauged because the job of the fielders is very easily defined: turn every ball put into play into an out. The percentage of the time that the defense succeeds at that task measures its defensive results. Saying balls "put into play" means we do not consider any batters whose results the fielders could not affect ("You can't defense a walk," as the old wisdom correctly states). Those batters are the ones who walk, strike out, get hit by a pitch, or hit the ball out of the playing field for a home run. (It may be argued that some very small fraction of actual home runs might, in theory, have been caught just at the fence top, but the number of such balls available to actually be caught is very small--there are published numbers--and the differences in the number of such that actually are caught will be much smaller yet.) The outs actually made by the fielders is simply calculated as all outs minus strikeouts. The balls in play for possible fielding outs are all batters minus walks, strikeouts, hit batsmen, and home runs (we don't fiddle with catcher's interference). The Table below shows all those data, plus the results. Those results are in two columns: the FE%, or "Fielding Efficiency": the percentage of balls in play (BIP in the Table) turned into Fielders' Outs (FO in the Table), expressed as a percentage. To here, we are on very solid ground, and the Fielding Efficiency numbers are both solid and meaningful. From them, with some rule-of-thumb but still meaningful further evaluations, we can get close to the true significance--or lack of it--of fielding at the overall team level to the winning of ball games. The first thing we do is to extrapolate the number of base runners that the team's difference from average in fielding has saved or cost the team. That's easy enough to do: we apply the overall major-league average FE% to the team's actual BIP figure (which is solely their pitchers' creation), and take the difference between that and their actual record. Then, for convenience, we pro-rate that out to a full season, based on their games-played-to-date figure. That difference is shown in the column headed xOB--and, again, it is a seasonal total. To get from more or fewer men let on base to more or fewer runs scored, we simply use the same proportion as the team has actually shown; that is not by any means an exact approach, but neither is it wild or gross. (Typical values are 15% to 20% of runners let on by the defense ending up scoring.) That roughly projected runs difference appears in the column headed xR--and, yet again, that is a seasonal value. Finally, we use the elementary games-won-from-runs formula to estimate the number of wins plus or minus that those more or fewer runs would likely mean. That result--as with the other projections, seasonal--appears in the xW column. (Typically, between 9 and 10 runs are needed to swing one victory or loss.) So, we can plainly see from the results that while fielding, at least at the all-team level, is not utterly meaningless, it really is a pretty small part of winning and losing ball games. Even if you are reading this in the early part of a season, when rather wild swings in data that will later settle down into much narrower grooves can be seen, it takes a pretty closed mind to say that defense matters much to winning, or even to the number of runs allowed in--it really is the pitchers who dominate control of runs yielded. Team Defense, Tabulated
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The SillyBall: why baseball before and after 1993 is really two different games |
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Fielding and Defense in Baseball how important defense is or isn't in baseball, and how to correctly evaluate it |
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Baseball Data Normalization: why raw stats need "correction", and how and why we can and cannot apply it |
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The Team-Performance Table there is a lot in that Table, and this explains what it all is |
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The Pitfalls of Park Factors an explicit, detailed demonstration of how and why they are so dubious |
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