Fielding and Defense in BaseballThe Traditional Baseball ViewBaseball is traditionally held to comprise three elements: pitching, hitting, and defense. In that tradition, the three are further held to be roughly equal in importance. Modern baseball analysis, discussed at length all over this site, has had much to say about batting and pitching performance; but many feel, as analysis pioneer Branch Rickey put it in 1952, that there isn't much that you can (analytically) say about baseball defense. But that is not so at all.One major problem, as always with analysis, has been a lack of good data. The traditional (that word again) baseball measure--Fielding Percentage--may have been--but one doubts even this--useful in an era when even "major-league" baseball fields were so terrible that errors were common in the best of cases: today it's flat-out silly. Only yesterday, or so it seems, the concept of "Range Factor" was introduced in an attempt to make better measure of individual fielders' abilities. Range Factor in its earliest incarnation was total successful fielding chances (by player by position) per game played; later versions reasonably changed the measure to total successful chances per 9 innings played at a given position (rather than "games," which could mean anything from 15 innings to 1/3 of an inning). With the advent of good baseball data from places like Stats, Inc., there have come some changes. Stats produces a proprietary measure called "Zone Rating," which purports to measure on how many of the balls hit into a position's predefined "zone" a man playing there makes a succssful play. The obvious drawbacks are the somewhat arbitrary definition of a "zone" and the inexactness of a determination as to whether a given ball was "in the zone." Nonetheless, both the RF/9 (the Range Factor per 9 innings played) and the ZR have value. We felt that what might help a lot in the large-scale evaluation of the overall significance of defense in baseball is an absolute measure. As far back as 1981 we had developed and published such a measure, and we now present it on this site. We call it an "absolute" measure because there is no judgement or subjectivity at all about it. It is a tool to measure team fielding effectiveness--it does not say anything about specific individual fielders. But it does, we feel, shine a bright light into this once-dusky corner of baseball. Some Baseball Common Sense: Making a ToolThe word "defense" signifies the efforts of the baseball team in the field for an given inning half to get through that half without the other team scoring: it thus comprises both pitching and fielding. No effort to separate fielding from pitching can ever be completely successful, because the ability of the nine fielders (including the pitcher himself, of course) will be more or less exercised in proportion to the pitcher's ability to control how effectively batters put the ball in play: that is, outs are not created equal. Three outfield cans of corn look the same in the box score as three running, diving, rolling outfield catches, but the fielding abilities manifested do differ. The men who caught the cans of corn might well have been able also to make the hard catches, but we do not and cannot know based on what actually happened. Good pitchers do make for at least the appearance of good fielders.All that said, fielding measures that encompass the performance of an entire baseball team, especially over a full season, will average out an awful lot of individual detail. If the whole pitching staff is marvellous or awful, that might bias fielding stats somewhat, but in the end even good pitchers give up fly balls and hard-hit grounders, so a team-wide baseball fielding measure ought to have some validity as a measure. Well, let's see what we have and what it seems to show, then return to the large issues. What is the job of the nine men in the field? It is, in the ideal, to turn every possible out into an actual out. What is a "possible" out? Well, as the old saying goes, "You can't defense a walk." That is, there are certain batter-pitcher confrontation outcomes on which the fielders can have no effect. Obviously those include the walk and the hit batsman; equally obviously, they include the strikeout. They also include the home run, the ball that leaves the playing field altogether. Well "Whoa, there dude," some of you might be thinking: what about the "home runs" caught at the fences by great outfielders? Stats, Inc. reported (in their Baseball Scoreboard for 1996) that the number of home-run-saving catches in all of major-league baseball for the 1995 season--presumably representative--was all of 64, or about 2 a team a season. Even over a three-season period, no one outfielder made more than 6 such catches, or 2 a season a man (and those in parks with low fences). And we may confidently assume that at an average rate of 2 a year a team, the variation from team to team in ability to stop at-the-fence homers is utterly negligible. The measuring now becomes easy and obvious: the possible outs are all batters coming to the plate (the pitchers' BFP stat) minus walks, hit batsmen, strikeouts, and home runs; the actual outs made by fielders are all outs (innings pitched time three) minus strikeouts. (There is a minor anomaly respecting double and triple plays: a baserunner who got on by way of a walk or being hit by a pitch and who is subsequently erased on a double (or triple) play is not counted as an "available" out. The number of such men will be seen to be, once you do the math, about 1.25% of all outs made by fielders; considering that the variation in that number from team to team will not be vast, we may ignore this anomaly. We mention it just to show that we didn't forget about it.) So, applying this tool to current baseball data, what do we see? Today's results are available on the Team-Defense page of this site. But the larger picture is this: Fielding Efficiencies these days range from an extreme low of about 70% to an extreme high of about 78%, with the major-league average being right around the midpoint near 74%. When we first set out to measure FE twenty years ago, the average was about 75% and the extremes were about 74% to 76%, but that was a two-season average for each team: bizarre single-season performances are averaged out. Some More Baseball Common Sense: Using the ToolSo much for the tool and its results. Now for the implications thereof. The average baseball defense will see maybe 4,500 opportunites--"balls in play" as we call them. Assume for discussion that the full-season difference in Fielding Efficiency from average is about plus-or-minus 2% (that is, ranges from 73% to 77% around a major-league average of 75%)--which experience suggests is actually an exaggeration of the team-to-team differences--we would see at the extremes of good and bad team fielding a difference of about 90 baserunners a year. If we take as a crude but passable rule of thumb (derived from experience) that 37% of base runners eventually score, we are suggesting a difference of plus-or-minus 33 runs a year from average to best- or worst-fielding team; that, in turn--from the games-won-from-runs formula--translates to about plus-or-minus three wins a season.Let's put that in perspective. The difference in earned runs from the norm for the best or worst pitching staffs in baseball will be 155 to 160 runs a season--almost five times the effect from best to worst fielding. Recall that baseball analysis demonstrates conclusively what elementary baseball common sense suggests to, apparently, all but the professional baseball person: runs scored on offense and runs surrendered on defense have essentially equal value in determining seasonal games-won results. That means that in baseball defense as a whole--pitching and fielding--is exactly 50% of the game. Fielding is, at most, not even quite 20% of "defense," so pitching is about 80% of 50%, or 40% of the game (old sayings notwithstanding). And keep in mind that if things haven't changed that much over the years, by season's end the variations from best-fielding to worst-fielding team may be more like plus-or-minus 1% than 2%, which would make fielding 5% of the game (not 10%) and pitching 45% (not the "80%" or "90%" or whatever that old-timers so glibly blather about). Conclusion: we can now say for certain that team fielding ability just is not a significant component of the game of baseball relative to pitching (which is at least four to possibly nine times more important), or--more directly significant, since fielders bat and batters field--than batting, which is five to ten times more important. In short, wood trumps leather, big-time. (Pssst. Hey, mac, wanna tip? Forget them flashy shortstops an' second basemens that can't hit their hat size; get a couple a guys that can hit an' ain't outright stiffs, then go get some outfielders that can run around and catch the bleepin' ball and still hit a little.) |
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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