How are these teams different, I asked myself. Do any of them have holes? If so, what are they?
So I dug in a little deeper and pulled zone charts for each of them, and put them side-by side. These data include performance by shallow/mid/deep, and by zones across the field. This made for a few fun moments, or at least thought-provoking ones, so I figured I’d share them.
First, here are the tables:
Note that the summary table (Total PAA by Position/Zones) at the bottom simply adds all the results for each zone a position seems to be responsible for, splitting the zones in the middle of positions (34, 56) in half.
Now a few comments:
Edmonton
Of interest here is how consistent the team is. Zone over zone, the team is workmanlike good. It’s probably not to surprising that each of three is pretty solid in the mid-depth zones, but Edmonton’s guys have been really noteworthy coming in on the ball. Their 12.16 PAA on shallow GB is best of the three we’re looking at by a considerable margin.
This measure really can’t separate individual players out, but until Donadoni’s injury at 1B, the team has been fielding mostly the same set of players, so in this case these performances can be used to pretty closely asses how good or bad individuals have been given the opportunity field they have been presented (that last will become interesting in a bit).
Bottom line: Espinosa and Ngowa have been quite good so far up the middle, and Collins has been solid at 3B. (I note that perhaps this measure says Ngowa as been a bit better than his +3.7 OOTP Zone Rating, and Collins a little worse than his +3.3, but maybe that’s picking nits). Of particular interest in the case of Ngowa is that blazing 8.06 in Deep balls up the middle to zone 4M. Regardless, Edmonton has just been solid everywhere to date. It might be interesting to see if Donadoni’s injury causes this metric to flag toward the end of the year.
Sacramento
Shoeless’s teams play defense, and a scan of this chart shows exactly how true that is. They seem to have only one hole so far, and that’s in the shallow hole between short and third (zone 56, shallow), where the team has registered -7.29 PAA. Their first base slot, manned by Quant Kouros and a bevy of others, has also been essentially league average. Up the middle, though, the club has been really solid, with Henri Charriere splitting his time between second and short, and Thomas “Walking Web-gem” Kramer taking over at mostly short after a trade.
As we’ll soon see, the rotation of guys the Mad Popes have put in the middle of the infield are arguably the best tandem in the game right now.
Kouros is an interesting player in this mix, and neither 1B or 3B (where he’s split time) register particularly strongly for Sacramento. Jorge Lugo played third before being traded, and appeared to boost the position a bit, so one wonders if there’s simple sample size issues going on, or whether Kouros just doesn’t like being swapped around. Regardless, if the Popes had solidly above average guys at the corners, they’d be fighting Edmonton for the top spot.
Yellow Springs
The message for YS9 resides on the right side of the infield. We see this in the summary chart, where the 1B/2B slots that are Chenoweth/Muto/Thum score in at essentially 25 PAA. Like Edmonton above, though, the Nine don’t really show any holes—the worst number in the table is that -1.15 PAA for balls hit right at the third base slot. Overall, though, the Tyler/Ritchie pairing is gently above league average for the Nine.
It’s maybe of note to see the three-time Zimmer glove winning Luis Pena hasn’t been as brilliant has he has in the past, registering only 8.71 PAA (YS has played the Thum/Pena pair almost exclusively so far this year, so those numbers are pretty much theirs. If Pena were doing what Pena would be expected to do, the Nine, too, could be up and competing with the Jackrabbits for most dominant infield in the league.
Of course, there’s something else to look at, too…
Let’s Talk Sample Size
I made a comment in the Edmonton conversation about the data being reflective of performance “given the opportunity they’ve been given.” Plays Above Average measures how much better or worse a defense has been relative to the league average defense in their position using the team’s opportunities as a baseline. So if one team gets 2000 opportunities, they are much more likely to score more PAA than if a team gets only 1000 opportunities. Over the course of a year, those numbers will generally be close enough we don’t care much.
For example, Edmonton’s infield has seen 1,143 ground balls to date, and Sacramento’s has seen 1,151. Eight ground balls is not boing to be enough to make a difference here.
The odd warp in this data, however, is that the Nine’s pitching staff is a dominating force. YS9 pitchers lead the league in strikeouts by a pretty wide margin, and lead these teams by even bigger numbers: Yellow Springs - 917, Edmonton - 697, Sacramento – 640. It all adds up to the fact that the Nine infield has seen 59 fewer opportunities than Edmonton’s and 57 fewer than Sacramento’s.
If one were to adjust for that difference, I’d guess Edmonton’s infield would still score at the top of the heap, but there’s every chance that YS might edge Sacramento.
Regardless, all three clubs are what’s known in the business as “very good.”
It’s going to be interesting to see what story the numbers tell at the end of the year.
