The Pirates are #2 in the National League at turning balls in play into outs. Numbers here, from Baseball Prospectus. (Defensive efficiency glossed here).
Apparently, this is more than luck. From BP basics article by James Click:
When analyzing defensive performance, the most important mental adjustment to make is to hold the defense accountable for every hit on balls that could have been fielded. Initially, this does not seem fair--defense and pitching are almost inseparably entangled. Determining if the causality lies with the pitcher or the fielders is even more perplexing than drawing conclusions about the play itself. This approach certainly requires some refinement, but it removes the decisions of the official scorer from the equation. Bill James suggested this approach in one of his Abstracts in the 1980s, calling the new metric "Defensive Efficiency (DE)." It is, quite simply, the percentage of balls in play fielded by the defense. The best teams are usually around .7300 with the worst around .6900.
So the Bucs look good up there at .716.
They finished last year at 0.687; 2003, 0.693. So what the hell is going on here? Are all the soft-tossing lefties making life that much easier for the defense? Or are these guys (Wilson and Castillo aside) better than they seem?
No comments:
Post a Comment