Examining the Tigers Infield Defense To Date

Last year, Justin Inaz used the public defensive data available at The Hardball Times into a defensive metric that produces a runs value for each defender. Well, Myron Logan, author of Friar Forecast, a blog on the San Diego Padres, used Justin Inaz's method and produced a spreadsheet of defensive rankings by position, players, teams, etc etc. He wrote a little ditty up for the Baseball Analysts and I downloaded the spreadsheet. Instead of me giving an intro, I'll just be lazy and use the intro that Myron used for his article in how these numbers are calculated:

The Methodology

The Hardball Times provides us with some great information to evaluate fielding performance. On their fielding stats page, they report, for each and every player, the number of balls hit into the player’s zone, the number of plays made on balls in their zone, and the number of plays made on balls hit outside of their zone. With these three numbers in hand, we can get a pretty solid grasp of a player’s fielding performance. But, before we get to that, we’ve got a few definitions to get out of the way:

BIZ (balls in zone) – This is the number of balls hit into a player’s zone. A zone (or zones) is defined as the area on the field where at least 50% of balls are turned into outs, at the position in question.

Plays – This category is simply plays made on balls in zone.

OOZ (out of zone plays) – This is the number of plays a fielder makes on balls hit outside of his zone.

Now, how do we go about turning three numbers into a decent fielding metric? Well, let’s take a look at Mariners’ shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt, as an example. He’s had 244 balls hit into his zone, and of those 244 chances, he’s turned 200 of them into outs. The average shortstop turns about 83% of balls in zone into outs, so we would expect the average SS to make about 203 plays, if they had 244 chances. Betancourt is about -3 compared to average.

How do we handle out of zone performance? Betancourt’s made just 17 out of zone plays so far in 2008. The average shortstop makes about .13 out of zone plays per in zone chance*, so we’d expect the average SS to have about 32 out of zone plays, given Yuni’s in zone chances. This puts Betancourt at -15 on OOZ balls and about -18 plays overall.

*One major assumption is being taken here. That is that the number of in zone chances a player gets also reflects the number of out of zone chances he’ll have. Since we don’t know exactly how many OOZ chances anyone actually has, we have to estimate this number somehow. Some people believe innings or total balls in play or something else would be a better proxy, but I’m using in zone chances here.

We now have Betancourt at -18 plays, but we’re not quite done yet. It’s a lot easier to work in terms of runs because that’s generally how we measure things in baseball, so we have to make one final conversion. Using the numbers derived from Chris Dial, we can turn plays into runs, simply by multiplying plays by .753 for shortstops (it varies by position as saving a play in, say, the outfield, is, on average, more valuable than saving a play in the infield). Betancourt now ends up at about -13 runs, or the second-worst MLB shortstop, ahead of only Bobby Crosby (-14.6).

That is essentially what you do, with every player, at every position (of course, Excel makes that a little bit easier, or at least it’s supposed to, if you know what you’re doing).

Well, hopefully you followed along because over the next three posts, I'm going to be breaking down the Tigers infield and outfield defense, as well as how they rank among all MLB teams this year. Buckle in, and let's start.

First Base

This year, the Tigers have used Miguel Cabrera, Carlos Guillen, Jeff Larish, and Marcus Thames at first base. Here's how they've rated defensively, in terms of runs:

Miguel Cabrera: -2.71 runs, 827 innings
Carlos Guillen: 2.82 runs, 162 innings
Jeff Larish: 0.86 runs, 12 innings
Marcus Thames: 0.03 runs, 37 innings

First base total: +1 run.

Second Base

This year, the Tigers have used four different second baseman. Here's how they all rank:

Placido Polanco: 11.4 runs, 889 innings
Ryan Raburn: 0.45 runs, 73 innings
Michael Hollimon: 0.14 runs, 8 innings
Ramon Santiago: -3.79 runs, 68 innings

Second base total: 8.2 runs.

Third Base

Brandon Inge: 1.97 runs, 192 innings
Carlos Guillen: 1.08 runs, 669 innings
Jeff Larish: 0.12 runs, 5 innings
Ramon Santiago: -0.57 runs, 10 innings
Ryan Raburn: -1.0 runs, 44 innings
Miguel Cabrera: -6.53 runs, 116 innings

Third base total: -4.93 runs.

Shortstop

Michael Hollimon: 1.05 runs, 44 innings
Ramon Santiago: -4.99 runs, 118 innings
Edgar Renteria: -5.56 runs, 876 innings

Shortstop total: -9.5 runs.

The Tigers infield defense this year has a combined worth of -5.23 runs. It's known that 10 runs equals roughly 1 win. Therefore, the Tigers defense has 'directly' cost the team about 1/2 of a W this year. Main culprits can't be identified until we tallying up the total for infielders playing multiple positions, so lets do that:

Michael Hollimon: 1.19 runs
Jeff Larish: 0.98 runs
Ryan Raburn: -0.55 runs
Ramon Santiago: -9.35 runs

So, with this knowledge, the much malinged Edgar Renteria has cost the Tigers 5.56 runs defensively. Even if you round that up to 6 runs, he's costing the Tigers just about six-tenths of a win defensively. He's basically been what he's been the past few years: an average or slightly below-average defender at the shortstop position. The much bigger culprite appears to be Ramon Santiago who is just a shade under an entire win in the bad while donning the leather. Often praised for his great glove in being a "Pacman Jr.," this method does not favor him highly at all. Michael Hollimon is about where I would think he'd be, although, he's probably better suited for second base, but it's up for debate. Jeff Larish is a first baseman by trade and as such appears to be pretty average.

Now, is this method ideal? No. There isn't a defensive metric that is concrete in it's exactness, nor is it without holes. There's such few statistics to quantify defense and, therefore, is largely subjective. That said, I prefer to use UZR, however it's not fully available to the public as the creator, MGL, works for the St. Louis Cardinals. After that, I like to look at the Probabilistic Model of Range. It's completely free via David Pinto and Baseball Musings, however, it's only updated every November-ish as that is how long it takes David to purchase the data, analyze it, and get it posted for the prior season. Chris Dial apparently has a defensive metric he plans to update, for free and for the public, everyday. Outside of that, there really aren't many (or any) in-season, updated, advanced defensive metrics in terms of runs. John Dewan, founder of Baseball Info Solutions which supplies The Hardball Times with it's data (for a cost), has a +/- system that he unveils in the Fielding Bible annually. Tom Tango has a fan scouting survey that he asks fans to fill out which is something I always enjoy and anticipate both partaking in and perusing the results. This one isn't ideal and takes an assumption or two into the equation which makes it not 100% accurate. However, using the publicly available data at our disposal, it's probably the best we can do at this juncture.

My next post will be looking at the Tigers outfield defense.