Twins defense is not that good

Last week The Baseball Analysts published an excel spreadsheet that compiles fielding performance based on a system devised by Justin Inaz using freely available fielding stats from The Hardball Times. Using the posted spreadsheet I compiled a Minnesota Twins version with tabs for; all players, individual performance at each position and overall position performance.

The system Justin devised is a Range metric, giving an indication of a fielders range, not arm strength, ability to turn a double play or pick a bad throw out of the dirt. In other words this metric looks at a fielders ability to field balls hit in their general direction relative to league average and convert those chances into outs.

Here are a few terms to be aware of before we begin:

• BIZ - Balls hit into a fielder's zone that are converted to outs
  
• OOZ - Balls hit out of a fielders zone that are converted to outs
  
• Plays - combination of BIZ and OOZ
  
• Runs - an adjustment to try and determine the amount of runs saved or lost
  

We're not looking at a full season's data, so any analysis will be incomplete, but what these numbers show is that the Twins are one of the worst fielding teams in the majors as far as range is concerned. Only the Royals are worse. How come the Twins are so bad? It comes down to the play of two players really, the infield corners, Justin Morneau and Mike Lamb. Here's a position by position breakdown:

Pos	BIZ+/-	OOZ+/-	Plays+/-	Runs+/-
1B	-6.14	-6.99	-13.13	-10.48
2B	-3.12	-2.88	-6.00	-4.52
3B	-13.90	-7.21	-20.40	-16.32
SS	-1.08	-11.95	-13.03	-9.81
LF	-2.38	-2.12	-4.50	-3.98
CF	2.99	1.86	4.85	4.85
RF	-0.40	-9.34	-9.74	-8.21

The Twins are giving away runs at almost every position, the lone exception being CF, where, using this method, Carlos Gomez rates as one of the five best CF's in MLB. All of the good work he has done is offset by other people playing center and Delmon Young playing LF though. Overall the outfield has been dragged down by the play of Jason Kubel and he's primarily the DH now, as it's currently configured Gomez, Young and Span is actually above average, with Span offsetting Young and Gomez anchoring the unit.

The biggest hole for the Twins has been the infield and in particular the left side of the infield. To this point Mike Lamb has played the most innings at 3B, and he's been terrible, bad at fielding balls hit in his zone and outside his zone. The shortstop position has been primarily split between three players; Everett, Punto and Harris. Everett and Punto were both better than average at fielding balls hit in their zone and below average on balls out of their zone which made both of them about average or slightly below. Unfortunately, Harris has been bad at balls in his zone and out of it.

Looking at the numbers above the shortstops have overall have been about average at fielding balls hit in their zone, the problem is they don't have any range beyond their zone. This combination of poor 3B and SS play has cost the Twins about 26 runs combined, the same amount lost by the entire Texas Rangers team.

The upside to all of this is that two of the Twins worst fielders, Lamb and Kubel are not playing in the field much anymore and their replacements are both above average. That should help a lot and probably already has, the Twins recent success correlates with Span taking over RF and Buscher taking over 3B.

While this metric leaves out some important parts of team defense, it gives a pretty good indication of a fielder's ability to field balls and make outs, which the Twins haven't been very good at that this year. It's surprising than that their young pitching has done as well as it has in front of such a limited group of fielders.