Friday, September 5, 2008
The Curious Case of Robinson Cano’s Defense in 2008
We all know that Robinson Cano’s offense this season has been a big disappointment. Because of his dreadful start (.216/.263/.319 over 228 PA), it’s tough to see that he’s been decent since June 4th(.303/.331/.469 over 328 PA).
Cano was projected to have wOBA of around .344 this season using the aggregate of several projection systems. His .251 wOBA over his first 228 PA is more than three standard deviations below what we should have reasonably expected. Even his relatively better hitting since has been below expectations, althought that’s probably partially because of the lower run environment of the 2008 AL. Also, as I looked at a little while back, Cano may have been slightly unlucky based on his batted ball types.
Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Cano’s defense so enough about that.
According to zone rating, Cano’s defense had steadily improved over his first three seasons, as he went from a ZR of .816 in 2005 to .846 in 2007. I had him projected to be about a +5 defender this year in terms of runs saved above the average second baseman and through his first 89 games of the year he looked even better than that.
As you can see, Cano’s been a butcher over the last 48 games, making 21 fewer plays than an average 2B over 182 chances, and dropping his overall defense from +8 runs saved to -8 runs saved. Here’s how that looks graphically.
How bad is a zone rating of .692 over 422 innings? I don’t have the data to look at splits for all years since 1987 (when zone rating was first introduced), but I can look at the full season data. Here’s a list of every 2B who played at least 300 innings in a season and had a ZR lower than .750.
So no 2B in a season where they played over 300 innings has ever been as bad as Cano has been over this recent stretch. That’s pretty bad.
It’s not my place to do any armchair psychoanalysis about the reasons for this. I’ve seen people calling Cano lazy and unmotivated and everything else, but HTF do they know? And if the new contract is to blame, why was his defense so good at the start of the year?
We should expect better from Cano next year on both sides of the ball, because we have a bigger sample size that shows he’s better than he’s been this year, but this year has put a serious damper in his going-forward projections.
Update: Added a plot of chances/missed chances by week as requested by rilkefan:
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