The Giants defense was bad in 2022. But after being exceptional in 2021, what happened? Defensive metrics are tricky, which is compounded by the fact that none of them seem to agree. For this exercise we'll be using Baseball Savant's Outs Above Average. According to Baseball Savant, "Outs Above Average (OAA) is the cumulative effect of all individual plays a fielder has been credited or debited with, making it a range-based metric of fielding skill that accounts for the number of plays made and the difficulty of them."
Now let's look at some ranks:
2021: +28 OAA (4th in MLB)
March/April: -1 OAA (15th in MLB)
May: -15 OAA (29th in MLB)
June: -14 OAA (29th in MLB)
July: 0 OAA (17th in MLB)
August: +1 OAA (16th in MLB)
September: +1 OAA (15th in MLB)
That seems to match the eye test. From being an absolute disaster at the front half of the year, to something average enough where we don't think about it at all - good or bad (save for a few Brandon Crawford outliers).
For the past few years the baseballs have traveled further in the air than we had come to expect. We know that last year (2021) MLB started introducing a new baseball that didn’t travel quite as far, but because of the weird/short 2020 season they still had some old baseballs leftover that they had to get rid of. At the start of the 2022 season, the baseball was not traveling as far and we heard all about it. The new baseball was here.
Over the last few years, players with no-to-fringe-power were selling out for home runs. Who could blame them, the baseball was going over the fence much more easily. Typically hitters do this to their pull side. Not strictly for these types of hitters, but generally when they weren’t able to get the ball in the air, they rolled over for a ground ball to their pull side. (Side note: Which came first? More shifting or the new baseball?)
This year, the ball isn’t traveling as far in the air. The players with less power had to change their swing, approach, philosophy, or all of the above to account for the change. The Giants are a very analytics forward team, using data to drive decisions and put themselves in the best position possible. But with a new baseball, there wasn't enough data to put their fielders in the right position. I’d imagine some sort of rolling sample is used so there is enough data to throw out the noise, but also bringing in new data that then makes the oldest data irrelevant. This way the sample is big enough and is also taking in new information and discarding the old stuff. If this is the type of model used, it wouldn’t necessarily prioritize new points, just blend it in with what exists (which usually makes sense as to not over correct).
So when the players that are swinging differently are hitting the ball, it’s not going to where the defense is positioned, because they’re positioned based on swings with the old baseball. This is especially true for how far the corner outfielders are playing off the line (and I don’t just mean in right field at Oracle Park). With the old baseball, fly balls down the line were more than likely to just go over the fence. So why position fielders there?
The Giants have had some of the worst batted ball “luck” I can remember this year. And while some of that can certainly be explained by a bad defensive roster, the roster is relatively the same. They’re of course a year older, but typically players don’t just fall off a cliff to that degree, where they went from one of the best defensive teams last season to an unwatchable one through June of this season. I think they literally put everyone in the right spots in 2021, and weren't able to do so in 2022 due to lack of data with the new baseball. Here's hoping it's better in 2023.
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