Breaking 100: Will the defensive changes help?

In the last off-season, Royals GM Allard Baird made several moves to improve the defense. In 2005, the Royals defense was awful. They led all of Major League Baseball with 125 errors. One could argue that the pitchers struggled because of this because they were afraid to pitch to contact. Errors are of course a very subjective stat, and don’t include what Bill James calls “defensive misplays.” (For more about defensive misplays, check out “The Fielding Bible” by John Dewan)

I just did a quick comparison to see if the Royals’ new defense might net a few wins over last year. For this quick study, I used Baseball Prospectus’s Defense stat which measures the number of runs the player saves compared to the average for their position. If a player has a zero Defense, they are exactly average for their position. Anything above zero indicates a better than average defender, below zero indicates a below-average fielder.

Accumulating each 2005 Royals player individually, the total Defense stat came to -43. That’s 43 runs below average. This means that if the Royals had fielded average defenders, they would have allowed 43 fewer runs to score over the season. Approximately 10 runs equal a win, meaning the Royals would have lost about 102 instead of 106 in 2005.

Replacing 2005’s Royals with the new players and using each player’s 2005 Defense stat, the total comes to -33. That’s still a below average defense, but is 10 runs better than the 2005 team. Unfortunately, that only equates to 1 win. The biggest problem in this scenario is that the Royals’ worst defenders from 2005, Emil Brown and Angel Berroa, are still on the team. The other poor Defense player, Terrence Long, is thankfully long gone.

This is of course a very rudimentary comparison and probably doesn’t accurately project the 2006 Royals Defense. But, at the very least, it allows us to plug different players into the defense to see their affect on the overall season.

If the defense gives us 1 more win this year, perhaps the offense and pitching can make up the other 5 games? We’ll take a look at that in future articles.

Let’s go get ‘em.