How valuable has the Reds' fielding been?

by JinAZ on Sep 19, 2009 6:00 AM EDT in News

Fiddling with fielding stats on a Saturday morning...

Here are some different ways to measure the Reds' team fielding this year:

Stat	Data	Comments
bUZR	+43 runs	2nd in NL
DER	0.706	3rd in NL
THT "Fld"	+44 plays	3rd in NL; ~35 runs equivalent
xRR	+73 runs	1st in NL;
ERA-FIP	-0.38	1st in NL; ~60 run equivalent
BtB PwrRnk	+49 runs	1st in NL; "my" stat is based on bUZR, THT Field, and catcher fielding

If one of the front office's major goals heading into this season was to improve the team's fielding, they seem to have succeeded: the Reds are clearly one of the best fielding teams in the league.

How much does it matter? Let's run with a figure of +50 runs this season, which is where I have the Reds in the BtB Power Rankings, and is a rough average of all the other run estimates. Add that to the average of ~40 runs below average that Reds teams have been from 2004-2008 (by bUZR), and you have a total of a 90 run improvement in fielding this year compared to the 2004-2008 teams. In the current NL run environment, that's roughly a 10-win improvement compared to the 2004-2008 teams!

Of course, the counter to this is that the Reds were roughly an average-hitting team over the entirety of the 2004-2008 span (+65 in 2005, -72 in 2008, roughly average in other years, according to FanGraphs), and are now on pace to be ~125 runs below average by the season's end (~14 wins).

So, their 10-win improvement in fielding is countered by a 14-win decline in hitting. ::sigh::

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Comments

Hey Justin, can you give us a bit of a glossary on the stats listed above

just so people know what really is being measured. Thanks!

Otherwise, great stuff! Like I said in yesterday’s game thread, the defense is the only reason I have any hope for 2010.

Definitely a good argument.

by Slyde on Sep 19, 2009 8:20 AM EDT reply actions

I tried to link to each source (where you can find descriptions), but here goes:

bUZR is Ultimate Zone Rating basd on BIS data (not STATS Inc data), from FanGraphs. For players, it’s as good as any stat based on one data provider.

DER is Defensive Efficiency Ratio, which is 1-BABIP. Basically, it’s outs per ball hit into play.

THT Fld is the team fielding stat listed on THT’s team pages under “plus/minus.” It’s not the same as Dewan’s plus/minus. Instead, it’s essentially a version of DER that explicitly considers batted ball types (ld/fb/gb), and then reports as “plays made vs average” instead of a ratio of outs/chances. I convert to runs by assuming .8 runs/play, which is about right.

xRR is the difference between expected runs allowed based on tRA (my favorite fielding-independent pitching stat) and actual runs allowed. Positive numbers mean good fielding/luck/pitchers park.

ERA-FIP does the same thing, just with FIP instead of tRA. You just divide by nine and multiply by innings to get the earned run difference (and 93% of runs are earned runs).

BtB Pwr Rnk is simply the average of bUZR and THT, plus a catcher statistic based on SB/CS/WP/PB/E rates.

All of these, except the last one, are more or less independent ways to assess team defense. You can look at things like RZR too, but it’s methodology is inferior to UZR and it tries to do the same thing, so I omitted it. ZR would be nice, as it uses STATS Inc data instead of BIS, but I don’t know of a good source for team-level ZR and I didn’t want to try to estimate it from player data last night when I wrote this thing. :)

Hope that helps!
-j

I write at:
Beyond the Boxscore
Red Reporter
Basement-Dwellers.com
Twitter: @jinazreds

by JinAZ on Sep 19, 2009 10:27 AM EDT up reply actions

Thanks

I’ll admit that I had never seen xRR before and some of the other stuff was not something we’ve talked about much on this site. I just wanted to make sure that people don’t get too overwhelmed by the lingo to miss the main point, which is that the defense has been wicked ahsome.

Definitely a good argument.

by Slyde on Sep 19, 2009 10:51 AM EDT up reply actions