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March 27, 2003

Breaking Balls

Fly Catching

by Derek Zumsteg

Outfield defense is, at first glance, one of the easier things to measure. If there's a fly ball and an outfielder catches it, they get at least one out, which is recorded statistically as a putout. But outfielders will almost never get a putout on a ground ball--the best they can do is pick it up and throw it to someone who will touch the base, or tag the runner. Can something that easy provide useful information?

In order to answer this question, I took the 2002 team totals for fly balls, subtracted the home runs, and looked to see what teams recorded the most outfield putouts. Now, there's a couple of caveats here--one, an outfielder can record a putout on a line drive, and two, an outfielder can record all the putouts that they (or the infield) make on shallow pop-ups. However, if you assume that all the outfielders got X% of their POs on line drives, and that a proportionally larger number of fly balls dropped, that still won't change the relative ratings and the interesting distributions we'll see. The only thing this really isn't going to guard against is if you believe that the distribution of fly balls between infielders and outfielders differs substantially between teams, which seems to me to be an unlikely possibility. (Or, if home runs aren't counted as fly balls, but that seems like a reasonable assumption.)

What looking at putouts against fly balls gives us a sense of is how good different outfielders are at making outs without having to deal with the fly-ball/groundball staff issues that plague Range Factor (RnF) and Zone Rating (ZR), without having to break out the formulas.

Take the Twins, for instance. In 2002, their pitching staff got 1,929 fly balls and 184 home runs, for 1,745 non-HR fly balls, and their outfield produced 1,202 putouts: 415 in center field, 397 in right field, 390 in left field. It's unusual, as we'll see, for the center fielder to not be the easy leader. The Twins were by far the closest--only the Yankees, where Bernie Williams barely squeaked by Raul Mondesi and Rondell White, and the Marlins (Wilson-Floyd-Millar) had such a weird distribution.

But of the 1,745 hypothetically playable fly balls, 1,202 putouts were made, which comes out to 69%. How does that stack up against everyone else?

			OF	 OF Putouts as
Team		Flies	Putouts	 percent of Flies
------------	-----	-------	 ----------------
Angels		1525	1181	 77%
Padres		1314	1013	 77%
Rockies		1378	1060	 77%
Cardinals	1424	1093	 77%
Reds		1393	1064	 76%
Orioles		1412	1069	 76%
Brewers		1440	1083	 75%
Royals		1459	1095	 75%
Braves		1411	1057	 75%
Indians		1406	1053	 75%
Expos		1332	988	 74%
Blue Jays	1484	1087	 73%
Giants		1576	1148	 73%
Dodgers		1395	1016	 73%
Cubs		1335	971	 73%
Red Sox		1355	984	 73%
Rangers		1470	1067	 73%
Devil Rays	1687	1215	 72%
Tigers		1602	1150	 72%
White Sox	1516	1082	 71%
Marlins		1474	1048	 71%
Mariners	1653	1172	 71%
Mets		1488	1047	 70%
Pirates		1293	907	 70%
Diamondbacks	1396	979	 70%
Twins		1745	1202	 69%
Yankees		1511	1032	 68%
Astros		1409	926	 66%
Athletics	1490	975	 65%
Phillies	1453	938	 65%