The 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates: Valuing Advanced Metrics Over Traditional Stats

Fielding

Fielding is more than just errors and flashy plays. It’s easy to see a low error count and think that guy is a good fielder when in most cases that might not be true. Sometimes it can mean quite the opposite as better fielders are more prone to make more errors because they’re usually the ones to make the more difficult plays. Ozzie Smith, the all time dWAR leader, had double digits in errors in 15 of the 16 seasons where he played at least 100 games. So how did the 2013 Pirates value fielding?

One of the biggest and most valuable ways a catcher can help their team is through pitch framing. This is something the Bucs took advantage of as much as they could in 2013. In previous seasons, the Pirates had awful farmers. No catcher in the history of baseball was worse at framing than Ryan Doumit, the Pirates primary catcher from 2007 to 2011. He had -127.6 total framing runs in his entire career according to FanGraphs. In 2012, the Pirates brought in Rod Barajas to take the reins for Doumit’s departure. He posted -13.5 framing runs according to Baseball Prospectus.

From Martin’s rookie season in 2006 up through 2012, Martin had 60.4 framing runs. That kind of value was being overlooked at the time, and that’s where the Pirates took advantage of making their pitching better as a whole. In Martin’s first season with the Pirates, the former All-Star had racked up 12.3 framing runs.

But catcher isn’t the only position that saw massive improvements defensively. In 2012, Neil Walker, Andrew McCutchen, and Pedro Alvarez all had negative defensive marks in terms of DRS, or defensive runs saved. In 2012, all of them were average or above average marks in the stat. Walker went from -4 to 0. Alvarez went from -5 to +2, and McCutchen went from -6 top +3. They also saw improvements from Garrett Jones (-9 to -2) and Josh Harrison (-4 to 0). Essentially, the Pirates in total from these five players saved 27 runs through their defense.

How did they do it? Well it was through the shift and studying batted ball data. According to Travis Sawchik in his book, “Big Data Baseball” (which I highly suggest you read since it is a very good book), in 2012 the Pirates shifted only 105 times. That number rose to nearly 500 at 494 in 2013. Sawchik also states that in April, the Pirates defenders were involved in 71 more defensive plays than they were in April 2012, and resulting in a handful of more outs.