Overall Defense, by Team(You can read a full 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 columnheaded 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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Measures calculated by High Boskage House Baseball Operations, using proprietary techniques.
All data soon will be (but is not yet) normalized for park effects and seasonal variations.
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Team
Defense (and its projected consequences)
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