The Red Seat Podcast: The one about defense

Good morning and welcome back to another edition of “The Red Seat” podcast. If you’ve stuck with this team during a frustrating month of August, one thing you’ve undoubtedly noticed is frustrating defense. Whether its a tag not applied at the plate, a routine fly ball lost in the sun, or simply a hot shot up the first base line, there are plenty of plays not being made. This is frustrating to us as fans, and has in many cases directly resulted in losing games.

On this episode of the show Keaton and I dive into what FanGraphs Def says about the Red Sox as well as what StatCast’s Outs Above Average tells us. Taking these two together gives us a pretty strong snapshot of what players on the roster are thriving defensively and which ones need some work. To be thorough about this exercise, we move position by position and breakdown each player who has been sharing time at that position. For example when we look at center field you will get a breakdown of how Jarren Duran, Alex Verdugo, and Kiké Hernandez has performed in the innings they have played at that position.

We end the exercise by looking at what these two metrics say about the Red Sox as a team and whether or not these metrics pass the eye test. They occasionally say very different things about a player leading to some confusion. Finally we put together the optimal defensive lineup for the Red Sox using our newfound knowledge.

Lastly, we answered a bunch of your listener questions before ending the show.

We hope you enjoyed the show and if you did, make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcast, Spotify, or Stitcher. Also give the show a review. Five star reviews help us get in more ears and grow the show. Be sure to also follow us on Twitter. You can find Keaton @TheSpokenKeats, and you can find me @DevJake. Thanks for listening!