The Giants and the Left Field Decision

The World Series is headed to San Francisco, which means Bruce Bochy has a decision to make. The games in Kansas City allowed him to start Michael Morse at DH, getting another power hitter into the line-up without forcing Morse to run around the outfield, but under NL rules, Morse will either have to play left field or come off the bench as a pinch-hitter. Morse is a terrible defender when healthy, and it’s not clear that he’s recovered enough from his oblique strain to live up to even his own low standards with the glove, but then again, the competition is converted first baseman Travis Ishikawa, who isn’t exactly a defensive standout himself.

If you’re going to have a defensively challenged left fielder, might as well pick the one with the better bat, right? Well, I’m not sure that those should really be the two choices being debated here. I’d like to suggest that maybe the best option isn’t either Ishikawa or Morse; instead, maybe the Giants best chance to win would come from starting Juan Perez.

Yeah, I know, Juan Perez can’t hit, as his .170/.224/.270 line this season indicates, and both Ishikawa and Morse have hit big home runs for the Giants in the postseason, so there’s a significant downgrade to taking their bats out of the line-up, especially with a pitcher already being forced into the line-up. Hit Perez and a pitcher back-to-back, and you’re basically asking to kill any rally that the middle of the order might start, right?

Maybe not. Perez’s 2014 big league line was terrible, but it also came in just 109 plate appearances. You don’t really want to base future performance on a month’s worth of at-bats, no matter how bad a player was in those opportunities. Especially when we see Perez’s numbers in Triple-A:

196 PA, .316/.372/.508, .385 wOBA, 128 wRC+

That isn’t a very big sample either, of course, but Perez posted a 105 wRC+ in Triple-A last year, and a 116 wRC+ in Double-A the year before, so his minor league track record does suggest that he does possess a modicum of offensive ability. And it’s why Steamer projects him as an 84 wRC+ hitter going forward; his minor league numbers suggest that he’d be a below average (but not disastrous) hitter, not too dissimilar from Brandon Crawford, who projects as a 90 wRC+ player and is an unquestioned regular for the Giants based on his defensive value.

Perez doesn’t have the same amount of defensive value as Crawford, but in a very limited sample, there is a decent amount of evidence that Perez’s defensive skills can be quite valuable. Over the last two seasons, here are the top 15 outfielders by the ARM portion of UZR, which rates players on how well they stop runners from taking extra bases and by cutting them down with outfield assists. I’ve included the same component of DRS, as well as scaling both to per-1000 innings.

#	Name	Inn	ARM	rARM	ARM/1000	rARM/1000
1	Leonys Martin	2,375	18	18	8	8
2	Juan Lagares	1,849	17	17	9	9
3	Alex Gordon	2,737	17	15	6	5
4	Gerardo Parra	2,516	15	14	6	6
5	Yoenis Cespedes	2,060	13	17	7	8
6	Adam Jones	2,762	13	11	5	4
7	Marcell Ozuna	1,937	11	6	6	3
8	Jose Bautista	2,100	10	14	5	7
9	Nori Aoki	2,255	10	5	4	2
10	Nick Markakis	2,695	8	3	3	1
11	Yasiel Puig	2,071	8	9	4	4
12	Juan Perez	498	8	5	15	10
13	Bryce Harper	1,835	8	5	4	3
14	Chris Denorfia	1,715	7	8	4	5
15	Ender Inciarte	909	7	4	7	4

Despite playing a little less than 500 innings, Perez rates as equal in total value created through stopping runner advancement as some of the best throwers in baseball; on a per-innings basis, no one has been better, by either UZR or DRS’s arm ratings. Of course, we’re dealing with less than one-half of one season’s worth of data, and we can’t just take these numbers as Perez’s true talent defensive level after we’ve thrown out his small-sample offensive numbers in favor of a more favorable projection. We need to regress these pretty heavily as well, even though the ARM portion of UZR/DRS is more stable than the range portion.

Using pretty heavy regression, Steamer forecasts Perez as a +8 defender in left field over the course of a full season — his +6 FLD projection on the Steamer600 tab includes some projected CF innings — which makes him about +0.5 WAR player over 600 plate appearances; the glove is good enough to play in the big leagues, even though the bat is genuinely poor. Of course, you don’t want to be starting a +0.5 WAR player in the World Series, but the reality is that’s what the Giants are going to be picking no matter who they start.

Even with his career 122 wRC+, Morse has been worth less than +1 WAR per 600 PA over his career, thanks to his atrocious defense in the outfield and extremely poor baserunning. Steamer doesn’t even buy into Morse’s offensive levels being sustained, projecting him as a 108 wRC+ player, which combined with his other skill deficiencies, makes him an essentially replacement level outfielder. And that’s when he’s healthy enough to run. If you assume that he’s even partially diminished in the field due to the oblique strain, then he’s probably a net negative in the outfield.

Given the need for multiple pinch-hitters in NL ballparks, Morse is clearly best deployed as a bat off the bench. You get one potentially high leverage plate appearance without any of the negatives of him playing the field, and can even pinch run for him if he reaches and the situation calls for it. Playing him in the field for six or seven innings to try and get two extra at-bats just isn’t worth it.

Ishikawa has been the compromise choice to date, providing more offense than Perez and more defense than Morse. But realistically, the gap at the plate probably isn’t large enough to justify playing Ishikawa in left against a team that has identified him as a significant liability in the field. Let’s take a look at the play that led to the Royals 3-2 lead on Wednesday night, for instance.

Lorenzo Cain is on second base after doubling to left center on a ball just out of Ishikawa’s reach. I think a better LF probably makes that play, but that can be a gray area which is tough to prove, so let’s just focus on the next play. Billy Butler lines a hard single to left field. Ishikawa plays it on one bounce, and here is a screenshot of where Cain was on the bases when Ishikawa fielded the ball.

Cain is three steps from the third base bag at that point, and yet, he’s not even considering slowing down. Here’s the screenshot from where he’s made the turn.

Ishikawa is already in his throwing motion. Cain’s foot is still on third base. And the result?

Ishikawa’s throw is a lob into the cutoff man, and it hangs in the air long enough for Cain to run ~60 feet before the ball is caught harmlessly near third base.

Lorenzo Cain is really fast, of course, but never has it been more obvious why Travis Ishikawa has spent his career playing first base. Watch the full replay again in normal speed, just to see how amazing this was as a sight in an MLB game.

Statcast tells us that Butler hit the ball 112 mph, so this ball got to the outfield as fast as any playable ball ever will. It was hit almost directly at Ishikawa, and he was able to field the ball coming towards the plate. And while the initial reaction was to credit the speed of Cain, we actually have Statcast data that shows that Cain’s top speed on this play wasn’t actually quite as extraordinary as you might think from the raw video. Here’s a screenshot of the recorded top speeds of the three runners on the play, via Statcast’s replay.

Cain got up to 20.2 mph — or 29 feet per second, a more useful measure of speed on a baseball field — which is certainly moving, but it’s only fractionally faster than the 19.5 mph top speed of Eric Hosmer. Even Billy Butler — who is among the slowest players in the game, and running out of the box without the chance to get a head start — got up to 16 mph (23 feet per second) on the play.

Cain went from his moving lead on second base to crossing the plate in ~6.3 seconds, for an average speed of about 25 feet per second if we think he ran about 160 feet on the play. That means that his recorded top speed was about 20 percent faster than his average speed. Even if we assume Butler was running top speed on a single to left where there wouldn’t be a play at first base, and we assume he can’t possibly run faster than that 16 mph, that still translates to 23 feet per second at full sprint. Knocking 20 percent off that would lead to an average speed of 19 feet per second, and even if we think he’s going to be much slower at reacting and getting started, we probably can’t get him down much below 17 or 18 feet per second for the entire play.

At 17 feet per second, it would have taken Butler roughly 9.4 seconds to score from the position that Cain was in when the ball was hit. I’m not sure three more seconds is enough for Ishikawa’s throw to get cut off, the relay to make it home, and Posey to make a tag. At the very least, it would have been close, and Butler is one of the very slowest players in baseball. Pretty much every player on the Royals would have scored on that play, or at least, made it very close.

With Cain on the bases, this was a no-contest run on a missile to left field where the runner wasn’t even at third base when the ball was fielded. Cain reached because Ishikawa couldn’t get to a fly ball to left, then scored because Ishikawa can’t throw. Juan Perez probably could have gotten to his double, and very likely would have been able to either make a play at the plate or hold Cain at third on Butler’s single.

The projected offensive gap between Perez and Ishikawa is +12 runs per 600 plate appearances. To think that Perez doesn’t make up that gap with his glove, you’d have to think Ishikawa is something close to a league average left fielder. I don’t see how we could realistically conclude that Ishikawa is anything near average defensively in left field right now, especially against a team that is going to be as aggressive on the bases as the Royals.

The Giants will need multiple pinch-hitters in each of the next three games. Ishikawa can provide value in hitting for a pitcher against a right-handed reliever, so starting Perez doesn’t remove him from the game entirely. But the Giants shouldn’t risk letting the Royals run all over Ishikawa again. The value of having Perez play left field is likely more valuable than trying to let Ishikawa hit a few extra times.