MLB teams
Jonah Keri, ESPN.com 8y

What is the financial impact of a player's defensive value?

MLB

There's a buzz phrase that's been whacked around baseball circles for most of this century, since the moment "Moneyball" hit the shelves. Ever since Billy Beane became famous for preaching the gospel of on-base percentage, everyone in the game has been on the lookout for the next "market inefficiency." At this point, it's a damn meme.

For a while, defense became baseball's new market inefficiency. The Tampa Bay Rays, a terrible team with a depressing history, rode an influx of young talent and a heavy focus on defense to the 2008 AL pennant and four playoff berths in six years. The Pittsburgh Pirates halted two decades of losing, then stormed to the postseason three years in a row, thanks in large part to a numbers-savvy commitment to glovework. Another small-revenue club, the Kansas City Royals, parlayed its own stable of young talent, a lights-out bullpen and great D into an unlikely World Series victory.

Then came the Jason Heyward signing. When Heyward crashed the big leagues on Opening Day 2010, he did so in style, belting a three-run homer in his first at-bat. A first-round draft pick and 6-foot-5, 240-pound physical specimen, he seemed destined to become an MVP-caliber hitter. To this point, it hasn't happened. In the three seasons leading up to his free agency, Heyward averaged fewer than 13 homers per year. He never slugged better than .439, never drove in more than 60 runs and never scored more than 80. If you're not a fan of team-dependent counting stats, Heyward rates as an above-average hitter overall by advanced metrics ... but still well below the top hitters for a corner outfield spot, where big offensive numbers are supposed to be a given.

Heyward had other things going for him as he hit the open market this fall. He was just 26 years old, uncommonly young for a free agent and at an age when four or five more years of peak production -- or even further skills growth -- was a real possibility. He was fairly durable. He possessed impressive speed for a big man, with three seasons of 20-plus steals and elite results by advanced baserunning metrics. Still, there's no way Heyward would have netted an eight-year, $184 million deal (one that will go down as easily the biggest contract for a position player this offseason) if not for one simple factor: He's one of the greatest defensive players of his generation.

Of course, one example does not constitute a trend. What we want to know is whether Heyward breaking the bank counts as a sea change in the way teams evaluate players, and whether players who were strong on defense -- once a sneaky way to find surplus value -- are no longer the bargains they once were.

One way we can examine the issue is to simply run through the free-agent position players who've signed multiyear deals over the past two hot stove seasons. The always excellent Michael Bonzagni of ESPN Stats & Information compiled that information:

A few thoughts on these entries:

• According to Baseball Info Solutions, Heyward saved 24 more runs than the average right fielder last season. That marked the third time in his six-year career he has led the majors at his position; he has ranked in the top four every year of his career. Moreover, he accumulated nearly two and a half times more defensive value in 2015 than the top 10 position-player free agents (excluding Cuban rookie Yasmany Tomas) did in 2014 combined, and nearly twice as much as the top defender from that 2014 group, Chase Headley.

• When the Cubs signed Ben Zobrist, many observers cited Zobrist's own defensive excellence as a key reason to give the 34-year-old jack-of-many-trades a four-year contract. Problem is, Zobrist has ranked 16th or worse in defensive runs saved for second basemen in three of the past four seasons, and he placed an ugly 32nd in that department last season. The hope is that a knee problem that hobbled him for much of 2015 will be fully healed by next season, else the Cubs will need to get a lot of bat out of Zobrist to make his deal make sense.

• Hanley Ramirez ... oy vey.

A better way to gauge the way the market has changed is to imagine Heyward in an earlier free-agent environment and contemplate what he might have made then. The free-agent class of 2006 featured two contracts for position players totaling $100 million or more and six deals lasting five seasons or more. Here are those deals:

Defensive runs saved numbers don't go back that far. Still, the data we do have tell us the top players on this list were acquired for their bats, not their gloves. Soriano was coming off a 2006 season in which he blasted 46 homers, stole 41 bases, scored 119 runs and knocked in 95; by reputation and the metrics we did have at the time, his defense could best be described as passable. Fellow $100 million man Carlos Lee was an even more extreme example. Splitting his '06 campaign between the Rangers and Brewers, Lee batted .300, with 37 homers, 116 RBI and 100 runs scored. Leaving aside that those traditional stats overstated his offensive value (he played his home games in two of the most hitter-friendly parks in baseball), Lee was a total disaster with the glove. By one Baseball-Reference metric, Lee cost his teams a staggering 28 runs compared with the average left fielder's defensive contributions. By comparison, J.D. Drew, who was the same age as Soriano and just a year older than Lee that winter, with a skill set that more closely resembled Heyward's (good but not great home run power, high on-base percentages and good, albeit not elite defense) earned just a hair more than half what Soriano got, with three fewer guaranteed seasons. Even accounting for Drew's sometimes checkered health history, that's a massive gap in valuation.

Let's then ponder what Heyward might have earned in that environment compared, to, say, Chris Davis. Davis clubbed 47 homers last season, vs. Heyward's 14, while driving in nearly twice as many runs. Forget that Davis played most of his games at the far less demanding defensive position of first base, that he was just a tick above average at that spot and that, by wins above replacement (which accounts heavily for defense), Heyward was considerably more valuable than Davis, generating 6.5 wins compared with Davis's 5.2, while playing in six fewer games. Transport both players back to 2006, eyeball the riches thrown at Soriano and Lee, and, even in our hypothetical scenario, it's hard to imagine Davis not earning tens of millions more than what the high bidder would've thrown at Heyward.

As an evaluation tool, this time machine test is obviously a blunt instrument. But we can see subtler signs of defense being baked into pretty much every team's calculus in today's game. By park-adjusted offensive numbers, Heyward was just a shade better than Pedro Alvarez, with half as many long balls as the Pirates' slugging first baseman. Alvarez is also just two and a half years older than Heyward. Yet while Heyward can now buy multiple peninsulas in the South Pacific, the Pirates opted not to even tender a contract to Alvarez rather than have to pay for a moderate raise on his fairly modest $5.75 million 2015 salary. The jury's still out on a few other test cases, including Gold Glove left fielder Alex Gordon, and big-bat, erratic-gloved Justin Upton. On Upton in particular, we've heard so little buzz surrounding him this offseason, you wonder whether his price tag might come in a lot lower than it might have nine years ago ... assuming Mike Ilitch doesn't get a Prince Fielder-level itch at the last minute.

The reality is that trying to isolate the financial impact of a player's defense alone is a nearly impossible task, given all the variables in play -- including offensive numbers, age, position, health, the state of teams' payrolls, the degree of need for that player and about 700 other factors. But the degree to which the market has changed in less than a decade, the glowing success of small-revenue clubs that have embraced defense-heavy philosophies and the jackpot chucked at Heyward for being as prolific a power hitter as Jimmy Rollins on his last legs make you wonder whether that market inefficiency might be near its end.

Hell, given how many teams are now jumping on the theme of super-bullpens, you wonder whether the next market inefficiency might already be starting to wane.

^ Back to Top ^