Marlin Range
Yesterday, we took a look at what goes into infield defense by examining the cases of Mike Jacobs and Hanley Ramirez. Keeping with the themes of defense and, well, the Florida Marlins, I decided to check some data out at the suggestion of colleague Brian Cartwright. Brian astutely pointed out that both Ramirez and second baseman Dan Uggla have posted similar fielding numbers in the sense that both looked slightly different in 2006 and 2008 than they did the year in between.
Interestingly enough, Miguel Cabrera’s defense at third base has followed the same trend, -4 in 2006, -8 in 2007, and -4 in 2008. Of course, Cabrera did not play for the Marlins last season, and was replaced by Jorge Cantu, who proceeded to post a -6 UZR. Let’s visualize the overall UZR numbers for their infield in this span, stacked up next to each other:
Name 2006 2007 2008 Jacobs -3.2 -4.1 -11.1 Uggla +7.0 -9.6 +2.9 Ramirez -5.5 -19.1 -0.3 Cabrera* -4.3 -8.1 -6.2
*-Cantu for 2008
In 2006, Jacobs and Cabrera were quite comparable. The next season, Jacobs declined slightly while Cabrera fell off much more, yet their infield peers, perhaps in trying to make up the difference, lost 14-16 runs from the year prior. Last season, the third base situation improved a bit and Ramirez bounced back fantastically. Conversely, Jacobs experienced a vast decrease in his defensive mark and Uggla gained 11-12 runs.
Their respective ranges produce similar results. While we might expect worse range from Jacobs and Cabrera/Cantu to lead to worse UZR marks for Uggla and Ramirez, there seems to be more at work here. Cabrera’s range decline of a couple of runs cannot be the sole contributing factor to Ramirez’s overall defensive mark falling completely off the chart. Likewise, how would Uggla get that much better if Jacobs also fell by the wayside?
As the Chase Utley/Ryan Howard example showed, where Utley posted a ridiculous + – score largely due to Howard’s lack of range, worse range at a position right next door can lead to more opportunities. Unfortunately, many forget that more opportunities can also lead to more failure, but Ramirez and Uggla did not cost their team drastically more error runs than they had in 2006, meaning their extra opportunities were not as detrimental as you might think.
As both MGL and I have shown here, more range actually leads to less errors, and vice versa, with less range leading to more errors, but even when the ranges of Ramirez and Uggla took significant hits in 2007, they did not experience huge shifts in errors compared to the league average fielder at their position.
It makes perfectly good intuitive sense that when the infielder playing next to you shows poor range, that your numbers would also suffer, but that does not seem to be the definitive case here. Perhaps something else is at work, like the pitchers being hit very hard, or both players experiencing the injury bug, but I do not have the end all solution here. Maybe a wisdom of the crowd approach would serve well to answer this question. So, what say you? Why would the defensive numbers of Ramirez and Uggla drop so drastically in 2007 when Jacobs and Cabrera did not take too significant of a hit? And why then would Ramirez and Uggla improve even though Jacobs severely worsened?
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Jacobs is just bad, and got worse by year, where Ramirez and Uggla are pretty much league average and their pitching staffs had more hard hit balls that were hit up the middle. Some of them may have been playable or not, but more opportunities on hard hit balls makes more hard plays.
that was meant to be a theory. not in any way a statement of fact.
One possibility could be the weather-if Miami were particularly hot and dry in 2007, the infield could have played faster than normal. I don’t see evidence of a faster infield, though, or of it being related to Dolphin Stadium at all. Retrosheet data shows that a higher percentage of ground balls routinely go to the outfield in Miami than when the Marlins go on the road, but the gap is actually closer in 2007 than in other years. In fact, 2007 is the only year since at least 2003 that the Marlins allowed a lower percentage of ground balls to go through to the outfield at home than on the road. Obviously this is pretty crude data, but it does not seem to support the idea that the home park was letting more ground balls through than in other years.
It could still be the pitchers. The Marlins did allow a higher percentage of ground balls to go the outfield overall in 2007, which doesn’t really say much since we already know the infield defense was worse.
Do you have data on defensive ratings to the players’ left and to the right? Perhaps the team’s defensive positioning up the middle was just bad in 2007, possibly as an attempt to compensate for bad corner defense. It may have been a misguided positioning effort rookie manager Fredi Gonzalez tried and then scrapped in 2008 when it didn’t work, but that’s pure speculation with no real support. Or maybe it’s just a complete fluke. It is very interesting how the numbers coincide, though, and I’d love to see more research into what happened.
Kincaid,
Whether it be the weather in Florida or the way the infield was groomed, I concur that the condition of the home ballpark’s infield is the the obvious source of statistical oddities like these. Your research on home and away ground ball rates seals it for me, even if the data is merely suggestive, not definitive. Kudos.
Is it possible to look up home-road fielding splits without downloading game files from Retrosheet and doing the analysis one’s self? I’ve often been interested in looking up such information, and I’ve been unable to find much.
In any case, great post to a good article (thanks, Eric!)
I thought UZR had a “hardness-of-batted-ball” factor with it that would eliminate (or at least tone down) the bias of having to field behind a pitching staff that gave up a lot of hard-hit balls. Or no?
Analyzing the interrelationships between adjacent fielders is much more complicated than can be done from the information that is publicly available from UZR. From the research that I did to prepare my BZM fielding metric I have many more categories of information that I can look at.
Uggla and Jacobs – The first striking thing about Uggla’s stats is the number of balls in his zone fielded by the first baseman.
—–1B_Plays—SS_Plays
2006—7——–7
2007–28——–1
2008–15——–8
Even though Jacobs was worse overall by UZR in 2007 he went from being 9 plays below average on balls in the 2B’s zone in 2006 to being 2 plays above average in 2007. Most of the additional 21 plays fielded in front of Uggla were probably balls that he could have easily fielded for outs. But instead 8 of the balls fielded by the 1st basemen were infield hits. BZM treates all balls fielded by the first baseam in front of the 2nd baseman as non plays for the 2B, but UZR docks the 2B value if the ball is not fielded by the 1st baseman for an out. So this one area alone would contribute several negative runs to Uggla’s 2007 UZR.
Why this big change for Jacobs in 2007? First of all Jacobs only played about 2/3 of the innings each year and had a different backup each year for the other third. Helms was the primary backup in 2006, Boone in 2007 and Cantu in 2008. Cantu was the only one with above average range. Helms a bit below average and Boone even worse than Jacobs.
The second set of numbers in the table is the help that Uggla got from the SS on balls up the middle. 2006 and 2008 are a run or 2 above average help and 2007 is 5 plays worse than average. This is probably an positioning adjustment by Ramirez to try and compensate for Cabrera’s poor fielding. The bottom line is that Uggla is about an average fielding 2B whose numbers were inflated by those around him and chance in 2006 but were worse than normal because of those factors in 2007.
Ramirez and Cabrera/Cantu – BZM actually has Cabrera’s LW/150 drop from 4 below average in 2006 to 20 below average in 2007, much greater than UZR. This is almost all due to a drastic decrease in range, both in and out of his zone. In zone went from 8 plays below average in 2006 to 31 plays below average in 2007. Out of zone went from 8 plays above average in 2006 to 8 plays below average in 2007. Although BZM and UZR both have Cantu below average overall in 2008, BZM says it wasn’t because of his range, which was 2 above average in zone and 3 above average out of zone. Cantu’s above average errors and below average in starting DPs put him below average overall. Ramirez is usually a bit above average in range but below average in errors but in 2007 his in zone range was terrible, 24 outs worse than expected. Cabrera did make 9 fewer plays in front of him but that and chance do not seem to be enough to explain this abberation. Those of you who follow the Marlins closely, was Ramirez playing with an injury in 2007? The bottom line is the Ramirez is a slightly worse than average SS overall that had an exceptionally bad year in 2007.
I don’t pretend to know how the UZR is calculated, but does it take into account the first baseman’s ability to “save” or “scoop” bad throws? That obviously would affect both the value of the 1B and of the other infielders. If it does factor it in, could you explain briefly how–you don’t have to go into the details–and if it doesn’t, is there another stat that attempts to do so?
Thanks.
How long do you think Hanley Ramirez sticks at SS? Knowing the Marlins track record, he’ll probably be gone soon. But when do you think he makes the move to third base or the outfield?
Why would anyone even consider switching Ramirez away from short? He plays it only slightly worse than average, had his best year there last year, and is only 25 years old. A shortstop who can put up over 4 wins offensively is a very valuable commodity. Only fools and Yankees owners ( which may be redundant) think about switching such players.