Team Defense
Remember when we were clamoring for the Twins to acquire a strong hitter at the expense of a bit of fielding? That we’d rather have a big time slugger in left field than a sure handed weakling like Jason Tyner. Well, we may have been a little mistaken. From Baseball Prospectus:
STAT OF THE DAY Worst Defensive Teams of 2008 Team, PADE Reds, -3.83 Rangers, -3.40 Pirates, -3.17 Twins, -2.51 Mariners, -2.44The Twins had been one of the better defending teams in the league for several years, until 2008 rolled around and we slotted Delmon Young into left and Lamb/Buscher into third and Brendan Harris into a middle infield spot. End result? We had the fourth worst defense in baseball.
PADE stands for “Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency.” Defensive efficiency is a simple measure of the percentage of balls in play that the defense converts into outs — this, after all, is the most important thing about a defense.
The statistic is then “park adjusted” to make Fenway look impossible to play in, thus inflating the statistics of the Red Sox and all their players. Other than Fenway, though, the park adjustment tends to normalize between parks, so we have a way to compare teams that have easy home fields to teams that don’t.
I think it’s telling that none of the other teams in the bottom five even sniffed the playoffs. These are bad teams, and bad teams have the worst defenses. Frankly, the Twins’ luck with men on base essentially balanced out the poor defense.
Something I feel the need to question regarding defensive efficiency is that it ignores the contribution of the pitcher. A pitcher who induces a lot of popups will make his defense look good when read by PADE; conversely, a pitcher who gives up nothing but hard line drives to the gaps will make his defense look awful.
And we had Livan Hernandez on our team for much of the year.
So, with the rest of the league deciding that defense is actually important, the Twins picked something of an inopportune time to sacrifice their defense. But I think Delmon will be a little better this year, and subbing Cuddyer in for him every now and then will probably help. Keeping Harris out of the middle infield and getting rid of Lamb will probably also help. And Livan is gone, so no more batting practice for our opponents.
Hopefully that balances out the impending decline in hitting with men in scoring position.
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I’ve got to think it will, unless Brian Buscher hasn’t been working hard to improve this winter (I can’t take any more errors/crazy throws to first. This is way worse than Punto’s penchant for sliding into first). Harris is a decent third baseman and Young won’t be nursing a bad ankle anymore (maybe will be switched back to third?). I’d say there’s a lot of hope for improvement this season.
I knew we were worse than normal last year, but I didn’t realize we were THAT bad.
Span at left, Young at right is an obvious improvement. Punto at SS full time is an improvement.
Buscher at 3B 70% of the time (or half the time) is a problem.
I wonder if Gardy will switch Span and Young. He likes to keep players “in the groove,” or whatever, rather than switch them around. (That’s why C always bats third, even if it’s Mike Redmond.)
With Cuddyer still around, Gardy will presumably want to only sub him into RF; meaning that Span and Young will probably be hopping between LF and RF frequently, unless one of them never gets to be on the field at the same time as Cuddyer. I kind of doubt that.
Ultimately, we’ve all been overlooking the fact that Gardy has found himself a prime opportunity to really fuck with the development of a couple of hugely talented young players. And he never passes up an opportunity like that.
Span had a good year, no doubt. Let’s see if he can continue that trend…