2010 Fan Scouting Report

For the eighth year, Tom Tango is conducting his fan scouting report on fielding skills. The results of this survey are a very valuable resource so I'm encouraging all knowledgeable fans who watch a lot of Detroit Tigers games to participate. The survey asks fans to rate the fielding skills of players on their favorite teams just based on observation. You will be asked not to use any stats at all and also not to vote based on what somebody else told you. Just use your own eyes as if you were a scout. The results were very interesting and informative last year but a large sample size is needed in order for them to be useful again this year. Some of the results appear in the Bill James Handbook which comes out every November. So, I urge all of you to complete the ballot.

Team Defense Costing Tigers Games in 2010

I think most readers of this blog understand the problems with using fielding percentage as a measure of individual or team defense, but I still see a lot of people using it in various places (e.g. television broadcasts and message boards).  So, I’ll review its limitations before moving on to better measures.  First, fielding percentage is the proportion of a team’s total chances (putouts, assists and errors) which result in either a putout or an assist.  The Tigers currently have a .982 fielding percentage which means they have avoided errors on 98.2% of their chances.  That ranks them 19th in the majors. 

One issue with fielding percentage is that error totals can be influenced by the subjectivity of official scorers.  An official scorer might occasionally give the home team’s fielders and hitters the benefit of the doubt by awarding hits on plays that might be called errors by another scorer.  Over the course of a season, this could influence a team’s fielding percentage.

Even if we assume that there is no scorer bias and that all scorers judge plays the same way, fielding percentage is still fundamentally flawed.  The problem is that it only penalizes fielders for errors made and does not charge them for balls that they can not reach.  It tells us nothing about the amount of ground covered by players and does not consider the difficulty of plays made or not made.

When Bill James introduced the defensive efficiency ratio (DER) statistic in the 1978 Baseball Abstract, it was the first time team defense had been formerly quantified in terms of range instead of errors.  DER is the proportion of batted balls in play, not including home runs, which are converted to outs by a team’s fielders.  For example, the Tigers have a .688 DER this year which means they have turned 68.8% of balls in play into outs. 

The Tigers are 19th in the majors in DER which matches the fielding percentage rank.  However, some teams rank quite differently on the two statistics.  The Oakland Athletics, for example, are first in DER, but only 13th in fielding percentage.  On the other hand, The Astros rank 29th in DER but 14th in fielding percentage.  So, the Athletics are a much better fielding team than the Astros, but fielding percentage makes them look like equals.

DER is limited because it does not consider factors such as types of batted balls allowed by the team’s pitchers (e.g. ground balls, fly balls), location of batted balls, how hard the ball was hit, handedness of pitcher and batter, and home ballpark.  The Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) statistic introduced by Mitchel Lichtman in 2003 further refines the measurement of fielding by considering all those factors.  The Tigers have a UZR of +8.5 which means they have saved 8.5 runs compared to what you’d expect from the average team.  

The Tigers rank 10th in MLB in UZR, but that’s a little deceptive as UZR does not include pitchers and the the Tigers pitchers have not fielded very well this year.  A similar statistic which does include pitchers is Defensive Runs Saved or DRS (John Dewan, The Fielding Bible – Volume II).  The Tigers have a DRS of +2 with places them 19th in the majors.  The Tigers pitchers have a combined DRS of –14 which means they cost their team 14 runs versus what you’d expect from an average team.  Poor fielding by pitchers is why the Tigers ranks worse on DRS than UZR.

The Tigers ranked 9th in DER, 8th in UZR and 7th in DRS in 2009.  So, their fielding is clearly not as good this year as it was last year.  Their DRS in 2009 was +40, so, according to that measure, Tigers fielders have cost their team 38 more runs this year over last year.  Since, 10 extra runs is worth approximately one win, we can say that their defense is four wins worse this year. 

Offense is Down but Strikeouts Rising

Yesterday, we saw that run scoring in Major League Baseball has sharply decreased since 2000 and that runs per game in the American League has returned to early 1990s levels.  Today, we’ll explore trends in statistics that contribute to runs scoring.  For the sake of simplicity, we will consider Major League Baseball as a whole, rather than divide into leagues.

 

As shown in Figure 1, the Home runs per game in MLB have dropped from a peak of 1.17 in 2000 to 0.95 in 2010, a decreased of 19%.  That is a significant drop in ten years and the result is a more balanced game.  The home run rate in 2010 was the lowest since 0.89 in 1993. 

Batting average (Figure 2) has also been on the decline, but not as dramatically as home runs.  The .259 batting average in 2010 is about 4% lower than the .270 mark in 2000.  The last time the MLB batting average was below .260 was in 1992 when batters hit a combined .256.      

In Figure 3, we see that bases on balls don’t have the same trend as homers and batting average.  After soaring to 3.68 in 1999 and 3.75 in 2000, walks per game have remained fairly steady between 2001-2010.  It’s possible that the spike in 1999-2000 was an over reaction to the high homer totals in those years.    

 

The most interesting trend shows up in Figure 4.   While batting average and homeruns have been going down, strikeouts have been increasing.  In fact, the 6.97 strikeouts per game in 2010 is the highest rate in history.  Strikeouts have been generally rising since 1978 when there were 4.77 per game.  That 46% increase between 1978-2010 is huge.  I think it shows the ever growing emphasis on power hitting and power pitching.  You would think that as homers become more scarce, we would see more of a contact approach to both pitching and hitting but this hasn’t happened for four decades.  

  

AL Offense Returns to Early 1990s

You probably noticed that the Tigers are not scoring a lot of runs in 2010.  Indeed, they are averaging just 4.34 runs per game (RPG).  However, there are a lot of teams not scoring runs this year.  A total of five teams in the American League have scored fewer runs than the Tigers and the league average is only 4.47 RPG.  That is down 7.3% from 2009 when the league averaged 4.82 runs.

While there is year to year variation, the chart below shows that there has been a general downward trend in run scoring over the past decade.  AL offense is down 10.0% from from 2006 (4.97 RPG) and 15.7% from the height of the home run derby era in 2000 (5.30 RPG). 

Offense is also declining in the National League but not by quite as much.  There have been 4.36 runs per game in the NL this year which is not much different from the 4.43 RPG in 2009.  Over time, run production in the senior circuit is down 8.4% since 2006 (4.76 RPG) and 12.8% since 2000 (5.00 RPG). 

 

The reason for the sharper decline in AL could just be random variation,  In other words, it could just be a down year for offense in the AL.  It will take a couple more years to see if the offensive output of the two leagues has really become that close.  If it is a real trend, one explanation might be that AL teams are trying to keep up with the The Yankees by emphasizing defense, which has become cheaper than offense in recent years.

  

Regardless of any differences between the leagues, it is clear that the we have come a long way since the crazy offense of ten years ago.  In fact, fewer runs have scored in 2010 than any year since 1992 (4.32 RPG in the AL and 3.88 in the NL).  What we have today is a more balanced game between run scoring and run prevention than we had in 2000.  I believe this makes for a more entertaining game with a greater variety of teams and types of players. 

Another Gem by Galarraga Versus Indians.

Armando Galarraga faced the Indians tonight for the first time since his famous imperfect game on June 2.  He started off right where he left off retiring the first 14 batters he faced. That made it 42 straight Indians set down by Galarraga.  After Brandon Inge made an outstanding play on a smash to the left side to retire Shelley Duncan for out number 14, you had to start wondering whether this might be another special night for Armando.  The streak came to an end though when Jayson Nix hit a double just off the outstretched glove of Don Kelly in deep left. 

Galarraga was outstanding in pitching seven scoreless innings. In fact it was one of his best games of his career.  He allowed just three hits, walked nobody and tied a career high with eight strikeouts.  Was it something that Alex Avila said?   We'll never know what kind of an effect the dugout spat with Avila had on Galarraga but he He was certainly pitching into the zone more aggressively than he has in many past games.  Gerald Laird was the catcher in today's game by the way.

It was an easy win tonight, something that hasn't happened very often this year even when they were winning in the first half.   Donald Kelly had four hits and Brandon Inge and Austin Jackson three apiece to pace a 16 hit attack.  The only Tiger without a hit was Johnny Damon.

The Tigers are finally done with their long stretch of games versus the top teams in the league.  They failed miserably during that time.  Hopefully, they can now finish the season in somewhat respectable fashion against an easier schedule.