October 31, 2005
Haunted House
The Royals turned Kauffman stadium into a haunted house, and Joe Posnanski uses the tour as a chance to say what scares him about the Royals.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Royals’ defense lately, which is probably not too healthy. But I can’t shake this feeling that the biggest problem for the Royals — and this is a team loaded with more problems than Apollo 13 — is their atrocious defense.
Here’s why I think defense might be a bigger problem than the Royals’ Dow Jones ERA or their complete inability to get on base: I’m not sure the Royals even know that they have an atrocious defense.
Take Terrence Long. At the end of the season, Mike Sweeney said Long should win a Gold Glove for his play in left field. Royals general manager Allard Baird concurred. The Royals, almost unanimously, praised the wonderful defense of Terrence Long.
Well, Baseball Prospectus, a Web site dedicated to helping people understand baseball, broke down some numbers and rated Long about eight runs below the average left fielder. That is awful. It also was consistent with the views of former teammates who, according to longtime Bay Area sportswriter Glenn Dickey, nicknamed Long “Magellan” for his around-the-world routes to fly balls.
See, defense allows you delude yourself. If a guy makes a couple of diving catches and doesn’t make too many stupid mistakes, you can start to believe, “Hey, that guy’s pretty good.” I think that’s what happened to the Royals. They had, by far, the worst defense in baseball last year. There is a statistic called “Defensive Efficiency” — invented by Bill James almost 30 years ago — that measures one thing. The rate batted balls are turned into outs. That’s it. If the other team hits 100 balls in play (home runs don’t count) and your team gets 70 outs, you’re defensive efficiency is 70. This is a crucial statistic, of course, since getting outs is half the game (scoring runs is the other half).
Last season, the Oakland Athletics led both leagues by getting outs 71.5 percent of the time. The Chicago White Sox were second at 71.3. The Houston Astros led the National League in Defensive Efficiency.
The Royals? Dead last. They made outs only 66.7 percent of the time.
It would seem that the rate of outs would also have a lot to do with the quality of pitchers. If a pitcher is giving up a lot of hard hit balls, they are going to give more hits.
And we know that the Royals did not exactly have great pitching. The Sox, Astros, and A's all had very good pitching.
Are there teams with very good pitching with a poor "defensive efficiency" stat?
Just have a "total number of batted balls in play" stat next to the DE, and see if there is a correlation between with higher numbers of BBiP and a lower DE.