Dialed in on Defense

Chris Dial released some of his NL defensive zone rating rankings last week and it is a good place to start looking at where the Pirates had some problems, as well as where they excelled.

Zone Rating has problems like it isn't park adjusted, nor does the data separate outs made in the zones from outs made outside the zones, which can cause some glitches. Also, it only includes ground balls and doesn't include double plays. Further, catchers ZR includes more than just ground balls.

His work is well respected and is an excellent starting point for play-by-play evaluations. It isn't perfect - it isn't mean to to be the Holy Grail of defensive stats. But it is the best of one side (zone rating systems) of a three-sided coin, as they say.

Dial looked at each position in the National League and pulled out the winners and losers for those players who played at least 650 innings at one position.

Here's how the Pirates ranked on defense in the NL:

RSpt is defensive runs saved per position played based on the amount of time the player actually played. RSp/150 indicates what the player's total would have been had he played every day. Rank is based on RSpt -- how they actually did as compared in the NL at their position. 1B isn't listed because nobody played 650 innings.

The first thing that stuck out to me was Nady's 0 RSpt, even though it was combined between the Pirates and the Mets. He must have done pretty good in NY because he certainly didn't do very well in Pittsburgh. Still, not a bad overall picture.

Burnitz and Castillo's poor performances were obvious. Their combined -30 Rspt is -3.75 defensive wins.

Jack Wilson fell off the wagon too as he led NL shortstop's in 2005 with a 15.6 RSpt. That's a negative 14 run swing or, -1.75 defensive wins just from Jack alone last year.

Throw in Bay's -6 RSpt, which is -0.75 defensive wins and we have -6.25 wins just on defensive contributions from 4 of out 8 players on the field -- half of which play up the middle, no less.

Want to know why the Pirates did so poorly in the first half last year? These four cats were a major part of the reason.

Duffy and Sanchez had very good numbers, as we expected to see. And Paulino even did well under Dial's work, which was *very* surprising to me.

Considering 4 of our 7 position players listed were under the NL median line in defense under Dial, including both middle infielders, and two of the three players on the left side of the diamond where a majority of all the balls in play went last year, no wonder we lost so many games, huh?

To be a .500 team in 2007, it has to start with Jack Wilson and whoever plays 2B. We *have* to be strong up the middle defensively first or we might as well just count on 90 losses no matter what bats we get or who pitches.

The Pirates will go as Jack Wilson goes in 2007. That should be our storyline.