Defense From The Hardball Times For 1st Base

Last year, Myron Logan (former author of Friar Forecast and current author of Another Padres Blog) penned this article at Baseball Analysts about turning Revised Zone Rating into a defensive runs saved number. After I read it, I contacted him and he had sent me his spreadsheet and I used it as well to calculate defensive data from 2008.

Now, Fangraphs publishes UZR data, so why bother? Well, because it's very simple to do this with just a little Excel know-how and I find defensive data very interesting because of the year-to-year fluctuations and how it is so far from the preciseness of offensive data.

Well, I've updated the numbers through July 10th, 2009. First, lets look at all teams. The following is sorted by total runs saved defensively:

Team	Total
PIT	62
DET	42
SEA	39
TB	38
SF	33
ARI	33
ATL	21
LAA	19
HOU	16
COL	16
MIL	8
TEX	7
STL	6
TOR	6
OAK	6
CHN	-1
WAS	-2
MIN	-2
CIN	-5
NYN	-8
NYA	-9
LAN	-11
PHI	-13
FLA	-16
BAL	-17
KC	-18
CLE	-21
SD	-25
BOS	-25
CHA	-29

For reference, the top/bottom five teams last year were:

STL	60
ATL	59
HOU	59
PHI	59
NYN	46

TEX	-34
BAL	-60
NYA	-81
MIN	-90
KC	-96

So, defense can make quite the difference in a team contending or merely being mediocre. For instance, if the Royals were on a Texas Rangers level of defense -- about -30 runs defensively -- they could've added nearly 3-4 wins to their total by just being a better defensive ball club.

Detroit's done this. In 2008, by this metric, the Tigers were -33 runs defensively. This year, however, they're already at +42 runs. That's a difference of 75 runs -- or 7-8 wins worth.

I plan on making this a series (taking a cue from Myron over at Another Padres Blog), and looking at each position's top and bottom five fielders, plus the Tigers players.

The first position I'll look at is First Base. Here's how all the teams in the league have done thus far at first base defensively:

Team	1B
STL	12
ATL	12
CLE	10
CHA	9
BOS	8
PIT	8
SF	7
KC	4
LAA	4
DET	3
NYN	2
CHN	1
TOR	1
NYA	0
HOU	0
SEA	0
MIN	-1
PHI	-1
ARI	-2
SD	-2
WAS	-3
FLA	-4
BAL	-5
TB	-5
LAN	-5
CIN	-9
TEX	-10
MIL	-11
OAK	-11
COL	-12

You've got to like Detroit being in the top third in the league. Here's the individual leaders:

Last	First	Tm	11
Pujols	Albert	STL	10
Konerko	Paul	CHA	9
Kotchman	Casey	ATL	7
Youkilis	Kevin E	BOS	7

Davis	Chris	TEX	-7
Giambi	Jason	OAK	-7
Hernandez	Ramon	CIN	-10
Helton	Todd	COL	-11
Fielder	Prince	MIL	-11

Albert Pujols is pretty good at baseball. But, we saw the Tigers are a positive fielding team at 1st base. Miguel Cabrera comes in at +2 runs defensively. Jeff Larish is +1 and Ryan Raburn is average at 0 runs.

One quick note: If you see any funky math where some things should add up to a certain number, but they don't (more specifically, in the team totals) it's because I'm rounding to the nearest whole number. Tom Tango's made some comments that make sense to me about how to present defensive data: it's such an inexact science when compared to offensive data, that just rounding to the nearest whole number makes it less precise then rounding to one or two decimal places. For instance, Albert Pujols is actually at 11.35 runs defensively, but we just put him at 11 runs saved defensively.