Opening Week's Defensive Wizards

First things first

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Flying leaps

In Wednesday’s newsletter, I wrote about the things that surprised me through the first five or six games of the season, with a focus on pitching and hitting. Today, I want to talk about defense.

If you have a favorite team and watch their games regularly, you get a good sense of whether they play good defense. And you know that good defense isn’t just about making routine plays and avoiding errors. That’s because errors are assigned by a game’s official scorer who decides after a play whether the defensive player made a mistake on a play he should have made with ordinary effort. The dropped pop up. The booted grounder. The missed catch on a relay.

With today’s advanced statistics, there a myriad ways to measure good defense. FanGraphs has an excellent glossary explaining the different defensive metrics used on the site. I’m partial to Defensive Runs Saved because it uses a variety of inputs to measure how successful a player is in doing the job they are there to do: prevent the opposing team from scoring runs.

The baseball statisticians at the Fielding Bible created Defensive Runs Saved and recently tweaked how they calculate it. You can read those details here. In very brief summary, Defense Runs Saves measures how well the pitcher and catcher control the running game (i.e. prevent stolen bases), how well the infield turns bunts into outs and turns grounders into double plays, and how well outfielders turn fly balls into outs. A key feature in calculating Defensive Runs saved is range: how far a player moves from his position at the time of the pitch to his position when he makes (or fails to make) the play.

Even if you don’t get into the weeds on how the Fielding Bible calculates range, you can see it when you watch games. The shortstop who goes deep in the hole between third and short to nab a grounder and start a double play. The outfielder who covers tremendous ground to take away extra bases on a ball hit into the gap.

In the 2022 season, the league leader in Defensive Runs Saved was Ke’Bryan Hayes, the Pirates third baseman. Hayes accumulated 24 Defensive Runs Saved. I was quite surprised to see that Hayes saved more defensive runs at third base than Nolan Arenado because Arenado is an absolute wizard at the hot corner and has been awarded the Gold Glove for his play at third in each of his first 10 seasons in the majors.

With the first week of action in the books, let’s take a look at the players leading the Defense Runs Saved leaderboard. White Sox center fielder Robert Luis Jr. sits alone at the top with four Defensive Runs Saved to date. This is quite the turn around for Luis who ended 2022 with -4 Defensive Runs Saved. His play this season has been just spectacular. Check out this running and sliding catch Luis made in an April 2nd game against the Astros.

(Photo from MLB.com)

After Luis, the Defensive Runs Saved leaderboard features outfielder Teoscar Hernandez (Mariners) and shortstop Willy Adames (Brewers) with 3 each.

And here’s a link to watch Teoscar Hernandez making a leaping catch to rob the Indians’ Josh Naylor of at least a double.

(Photo from MLB.com)

And here’s some nifty glove work by Willy Adames in the Brewers’ April 1st game against the Cubs.

You can keep track of Defense Runs Saved leaders throughout the season by going to FanGraphs, pointing your arrow at the Leaders tab at the top of the page, clicking on Fielding 2023, and then clicking on DRS.

Who’s been your favorite player to watch in the field so far this season? Leave your answer in the comments.