JABO: Rx for Cleveland: Catch More Baseballs
We love to discuss and analyze hitting and we love to discuss and analyze pitching, but when it comes to fielding, we often just lump it in with pitching and move on to cleaning the kitchen or preventing the kids from setting the TV on fire. Well put down that sponge and don that flame-retardant suit because we’re going to talk about fielding!
A quick perusal of the AL Central standings reveals a few things. The Royals still think they are in the 2014 playoffs. The Twins don’t know they’re not very good. The Tigers don’t know they’re too old. The White Sox can apparently sign whomever they want and they’ll still be the White Sox. And at the bottom, Cleveland fields the ball like their gloves are made of actual gold. Contrary to anything awards-related you might have heard, this is not good. It is a problem for more reasons than irony and it is a primary reason the Indians are where they are in the standings.
But I’m presupposing here. Cleveland is allowing 4.6 runs per game. Only Boston (4.8) is giving up more among American League teams. The problem doesn’t sound like fielding; it sounds like pitching! Let’s see.
what’s with all this cleveland bias carson? i mean kluber was bad enough then you couldn’t stop raving about danny salazar, you give carrasco a 10 on your nerd scores.
can’t you write about something else besides cleveland? there are 29 other teams in mlb, in the both the us and Canada.
The Royals are playing like a team that’s chasing their dreams.
The Tigers are playing like a team that knows how to win, and has won before.
The Twins are playing like a team that’s tasting success and is hungry for more.
The Indians are playing like a team in a city with a losing culture, with “break-out candidates” playing like “question marks.”
http://twtwsports.blogspot.com/2015/03/twtws-2015-al-central-preview.html
You make me miss FREE_AEC.
Except Cleveland has won 7 of their last 10. They’ve actually gotten really great performance out of Kipnis, Kluber, Carrasco, Salazar, Bauer, Brantley, Raburn, Murphy, and Bourn as of late. If you look at most of these hitters in May, they’ve played very well. The pitching staff has been lights out the past two turns with the exception of one Marcum start.
The Royals are playing like a team that’s “chasing their dreams?” Is this a Lifetime movie?
Don’t take his bait. Why someone with such a completely non-analytical mind — who bases a team’s success on “will to win” or “heart” or “chasing success” rather than skills, numbers, FACTS – which is what we’re all about here at Fangraphs — why someone like that bothers to come here and comment at all is beyond me. I’m sure he could have a conversation with Hawk Harrelson that the two of them would find interesting and inspiring, but he’s not ready to have an intelligent conversation with the average Fangraphs reader.
Sure, the position players have been bad on defense, but you can’t discount the fact that Cleveland’s pitchers have accumulated -11 DRS compared to the rest of the team’s -12. The Indian” pitchers are tied with Philly for worst defense by DRS, the next worst are tied at -8. The pitchers might be pitching well, but they’re killing themselves on anything hit near them.
Bottom ten teams by pitcher DRS:
Cardinals: -1
Tigers: -2
Twins: -2
Braves: -2
Dodgers: -2
Cubs: -3
Angels: -5
White Sox: -8
Padres: -8
Indians:-11
Phillies: -11
Bottom 10 teams by DRS (difference between pitcher and postion player DRS in parenthesis):
Nationals: -9 (-10)
Angels: -11 (-6)
Red Sox : -11 (-13)
Mariners: -11 (-14)
Twins: -13 (-11)
Padres: -14 (-6)
Rangers: -19 (-20)
Yankees: -19 (-21)
Indians: -23 (-12)
White Sox: -27 (-19)
Phillies: -31 (-20)
So using DRS, it looks like while the Indians position players are in fact bad, they’re not nearly as terrible as some of these other teams. Their pitchers really need to do more fielding drills or something.
I’d like to think that people are smarter than to just say Cleveland is bad on defense.
The pitchers are a big part of the problem, plus Santana. Ramirez had 4 DRS at SS last year in limited time and was in the positive at 2B too, so bringing up Lindor probably wouldn’t make as much of a difference as just getting Ramirez more focused on defense. Chisenhall and Kipnis have been good, and both Perez and Gomes play pretty well behind the plate. The infield wouldn’t be that bad if they could just DH Santana.
Moss has been decent in RF. Brantley and Bourn have not been fantastic, but what do you want from the front office? Brantley doesn’t look bad in the OF but his numbers aren’t good, and Bourn was brought in for his speed and defense, but hasn’t brought that in any capacity.
-22 of their -23 DRS come from the pitchers, Santana, Bretty Hayes, or Ramirez – Hayes is gone and Ramirez is likely to play much better. Santana needs booted from 1B in favor of DH, but the pitchers…you can’t really help it with most of them. Maybe Rzepczynski can be tossed in favor of Crockett, I don’t know. But you probably won’t get much improvement there.
While Santana has been awful at 1B, he was much better there last year in twice the sample size. Do we really believe that he’s roughly as bad at 1B this year as he was at 3B last year? I have to think that he’ll probably regress closer to his 2014 performance where he was a tick below average by UZR/150, largely because it’s his largest sample to date, also, by DRS, without this season’s sample, he’s averaged -2.78 at 1B/1000 innings.
If push does come to shove though, the Indians can always rotate Santana, Swisher, and Moss at 1B to balance out the short comings that Santana has.
Yeah, it’s really weird, but several of the guys everyone was worried about (Kipnis, Chisenhall, Moss) have been the best defenders on the team by UZR. Others who were expected to be good have been horrible, (Ramirez especially). Aside from that they’ve hit some pretty crappy luck, the difference between FIP and ERA given the number of innings pitched should equate to approximately -28.9 runs, the DRS and Def appear to only have them with -16 or so runs, so that also suggests that those poor defensive plays have happened at high leverage times, or that sometimes their opponents are just hitting where they ain’t.
Their pitchers’ BABIP is also about 10-15 pts higher than last year (with similarly bad defense) and their hitters’ BABIP is about 10-15 points lower, so they might be running into some impressively bad luck and hopefully (I’m a Clevelander, so rather optimistic) they will regress and that will help things out.
(Also the pitchers’ poor DRS seems like a weird fluky thing that will likely regress somewhat, given that last year the pitchers had a -5 DRS over the whole season and the staff hasn’t changed that much, in addition, no team in the league over the past 4-5 seasons has had a pitching staff with a worse DRS than -18 or so for the entire year, and if this poor play by the Tribe pitching staff were to keep up, they’d end up with -40, it just seems unlikely that they’d be that much worse, much more likely that they just hit a bad fielding stretch early, and that many of the teams have had good stretches/bad stretches, but that they even out over the course of a season, Indians just hit their bad stretch early).