Baseball DIY

You know a baseball story's big when it makes NPR's Talk of the Nation. Such is the case with Alfonso Soriano's refusal to move to the outfield for his new team, the Washington Nationals.

I'm not here to weigh in on who's right in that little squabble (although I lean more toward Soriano's side than the Nats', mainly because the Nationals should have made sure he'd switch positions before they traded for him). Rather, I want to take a minute to explore a tangent of this issue: Alfonso Soriano's level of play as a defensive second baseman.

The consensus seems to be that a kitten wearing a satellite dish on its head would do as well at second as Soriano does. The main support for this theory is that Soriano commits a lot of errors, which is true (though the matter of how important a subjective metric like Errors really is merits its own discussion).

Soriano committed 21 errors last season, the most of by a major-league second baseman (Yankees rookie Robinson Cano was next with 17, followed by veterans Jeff Kent and Craig Biggio with 16 each). In fact, Soriano has "led" major-league second basemen in errors every year since 2001, his first full season in the bigs. But does he lead them by an egregious amount? Not really. The biggest margin of difference between Soriano and the second baseman with the second-most errors is 7 in 2004, when Soriano was charged with 23 errors to Ray Durham's 16. Soriano, though, bettered Durham in Range Factor and Zone Rating, while also collecting 176 more Total Chances than Durham.

What usually goes unsaid when discussing Soriano's defense is that Errors is not the only stat in which Soriano ranks highly. Here are Soriano's 2005 AL rankings (among players who played >100 games at second base): first in Total Chances, Double Plays and Assists; second in Putouts; fourth in Range Factor; and, yes, dead last in Zone Rating (however, had he played in the National League, he would have finished ahead of Ray Durham, Marcus Giles, and Craig Biggio).

It is not my contention that Soriano is a great fielder. He's not. But he's also not the defensive Gigli that people say he is. There's a big difference between being the majors' worst defensive second baseman and being the one that commits the most errors.

If you really want to pick on him for something, check out his 2005 OBP and home/away splits.