When It’s Time For a Change

One of the concepts that I’ve been thinking about more recently is defense.

The ugly stepchild of sabermetrics family tree, defense has never liked to do out on the family outings with pitching and hitting or take part in board game night. We’ve never really been able to relate.

But with the stats available, so far the Giants are not faring well.

The team is currently 17 plays below average in the Hardball Times plus/minus ratings, good for second-worst in the National league (good lord, the Pirates are bad, at -30). That’s 17 extra outs for Giants’  pitchers.

Part of the problem is that the Giants infield has only made 61 out of zone plays, compared with a league average of 75. I still have a lot to learn about defensive metrics (one of the reasons I’m writing this) but that seems to suggest that the Giants are missing some infield range as players aren’t able to go much further than the area designated to them.

Indeed, Giants infielders rank very low in RZR, the percentage of balls in their zone turned into outs. Ray Durham and Eugenio Velez each have the lowest ratings for their inning levels (186 and 287 respectively), Jose Castillo is 12th among qualified players at third, and if Rich Aurilia qualified at first he’d be just ahead of Prince Fielder, fourth-worst in the league

The Giants shortstops have fielded better, as was to be expected for a trio of no-hit, all field players in Emanuel Burriss, Brian Bocock and Omar Vizquel. Combined they have basically been Kahil Greene, playing 530 innings with 19 OOZ plays.

In a season heralded as “Pitching and Defense to the Rescue!” the defense part has not been up to par. While the team FIP is only .03 lower than actual ERA (4.31 to 4.34) this team doesn’t have the offense to support “average” in the field. The solace of course is that a majority of the offenders may be gone next year, but this will be something to keep an eye on as Sabean rebuilds this team over the next few years.