FanPost

A Comparison of Markakis' and Heyward's Outfield Range in 2015 (Or why rangy outfielders are flyball pitchers' best friends).

Note: I tried to post this in the game recap comments in response to a conversation about Markakis' and Heyward's respective range in RF, but the reply button was wigging out on me, so I'll post it here. It's not that well thought out, but it does have pictures.

We all know that Heyward is a better outfielder than Markakis. What I'm interested in is how much worse Markakis' range has been this year than Heyward's. (Obligatory caveat about defensive metrics, sample sizes, and volatility. A season's worth isn't enough to feel confident in these numbers, but I was really just interested in comparing 2015 performance, so it's what we have).

2015 Heyward Ultimate Zone Rating per 150 games (UZR/150).... 15

2015 Kakes UZR/150 ............................................................................... -2.2

So clearly Heyward has been better this year, but UZR is broken down into components, and what I'm really interested in is the range component, or Range Runs Above Average (RngR).

2015 Heyward RngR ................................................................................. 8.8

2015 Kakes RngR ........................................................................................ 1.7

The gap is a lot narrower now. Kakes' RngR has been better than average and only been 7 runs worse than Heyward's, which is significantly down from his career highs (RngR's of over 21 in 2014 and 2012). Interestingly, UZR has really knocked Kakes for his arm this year, giving him a -4.8 on the Arm component of UZR compared to a 2.1 for J-Hey. So according to UZR, Markakis' range has been better than I expected, but his arm has been worse.

We can also look at the individual missed and made plays for each player in 2015 to help shed some more light on each player's range. First the missed plays ...

You can see the big swath of white where Heyward has caught everything, but he's failed to make a couple of easy plays (the green dots). You can also kinda make out a white area on Kakes' chart, with one orange dot in the middle. It's noticeably smaller than Heyward's. Kakes has made almost all the easy plays, but missed more of the moderately difficult to difficult plays (the orange and yellow dots). Clearly, Kakes' range has been more limited than Heyward's this year, but when he misses plays, they're often ones categorized as more likely than not to be missed by major-league outfielders by Baseball Info Solutions Inside Edge (which supplies the raw data for these charts and the defensive metrics). Not spectacular, for sure, but not awful.

Now for the made plays ...

Kakes has made a handful of difficult to moderately difficult plays but no exceptional ones (the red dots). Heyward has made one of those, but other than that one great catch, it looks as though he and Kakes have made about the same number of difficult to moderately difficult plays (the yellow and orange dots). We can see by comparing the missed and made plays for the two players that Kakes has had more opportunities for difficult to moderately difficult plays than Heyward, and made a significantly lower percentage of them. This highlights something important about the nature of defensive stats. Players can only make the plays they have the opportunity to make. In 2015 it seems as though Heyward has had less of a chance to showcase his abilities on the difficult to moderately difficult plays, which is possibly why his RngR is down compared to his days with the Braves. I'm guessing that, ironically, the Cards' pitchers would have been better able to hide Kakes' range-related shortcomings, and the Braves' pitchers really needed a rangier rightfielder like Heyward.

This brings me to my final point. The Braves' pitchers have the 6th highest flyball rate in the majors (whereas the Cards have the 7th lowest). When your pitchers have batters hitting the ball in the air a lot, it's more important to have outfielders that can run them down. Markakis really isn't that guy, and as long as the Braves pitchers keep generating a lot of flyballs, Kakes' problems running down the difficult to moderately difficult ones is going to continue to get exposed.

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