What’s happening with the Arizona defense and how can it improve?
Introduction
This past series with the Baltimore Orioles pitted two franchises with remarkably similar profiles: mid-sized market teams with an excellent cadre of young talent emerging from ugly rebuilds whose success is sometimes overshadowed by their larger-market divisional rivals. There is another, less complimentary, similarity between the two teams as well – they’ve been sloppy on defense in the early going of the season. Amazingly, the D-Backs have already accumulated nine errors through the first 13 games of the season. I’ll admit that there’s a bit of an asterisk associated with that number as three of those errors came in the second game of the season against the Cubs, but I’ll contend that my larger point still stands. I knew that there would likely be a distinct step down in defensive quality with the departure of a Gold Glove-caliber first baseman like Christian Walker, but I still had higher expectations for the defense than what we’ve seen so far. In fact, one of the reasons why Corbin Burnes’ first start of the season against the Yankees had such an ugly final line was because of this even uglier play from Josh Naylor.
But it’s not just Naylor – or any single player – that is driving this poor play. It’s also unfair to only look at errors as a metric for a player’s fielding efficiency as the statistic is inherently subjective based on the official scorer’s opinion of the play. Look no further for how the subjectivity of errors (and small sample sizes) can have outsized impacts on player statistics than MLB changing this egregious play from a hit to an error, which lowered Cade Povich’s ERA from 6.10 to 3.49 with a single pen stroke. But both of those topics are articles for another day. What might be causing these defensive issues and what, if anything, can be done to course correct before it starts to impact the team on a larger level?
Infield
If you’ve been a fan of the D-Backs over the past several years, you likely know that clean, crisp defense has been one of their calling cards in their recent resurgence. The numbers back that up too as the team has had the fewest errors in the majors the last two seasons, which undoubtedly has helped fuel their success. I suspect that there are three coinciding dynamics at play in the poor infield defense: Walker’s exodus, Ketel Marte’s injury, and general inexperience or discomfort from the players. And while I don’t want to single any one player out, Eugenio Suarez has sadly continued a career-long trend of iffy defense at the hot corner. As I stated above, errors are not my preferred fielding metric because of their inherent subjectivity. I much prefer something like defensive runs saved (DRS) from Baseball Reference as it combines a few different metrics that also take into account positioning and shifting.
This alternative metric generally agrees with the overall defensive excellence that the team has exhibited over the past couple seasons – especially in their 2023 campaign when they were a top-five defense. Unfortunately, two of the DRS leaders from last year’s team, Marte and Walker, are missing from the dirt and that absence doubtlessly impacts the overall defense. Marte’s absence is particularly painful as one of his stand-ins – Garrett Hampson – has struggled to settle in while Tim Tawa is still trying to find his sea legs at the major league level. Similarly, because of the constancy and excellence that Walker exhibited at first base, there was an unsurprising amount of confidence the other infielders had that he would be able to clean up an errant throw that Naylor hasn’t attained yet. Ideally, Marte’s return from injury and Naylor’s continued growth will clean up some of this inconsistency over the course of the season.
Conclusion
During my relatively brief time playing baseball, my father would often tell me that physical errors are inevitable and forgivable, it’s the mental errors that really stick with you. In my opinion, most of the (fielding) errors the D-Backs have made so far have been more of the former than the latter. Those kinds of mistakes are to be expected when you do something as many times as ball players do – if for no other reason than the law of large numbers. But that fact doesn’t make them any less frustrating to watch as a fan, especially if they end up costing the team otherwise winnable games. It would not shock me if some of the inconsistency we’ve seen so far comes from players still rounding into form with repeated reps alongside their teammates.