Want a fun little tidbit to bolster your Hall of Fame case? How about the fact that you're literally the greatest defensive player in the history of Major League Baseball, regardless of position? That do anything for you?
Of course, no metrics are perfect, and as soon as you look at the leaderboards in this particular statistic you might raise your eyebrows once or twice. But sitting atop the list after passing the previous record-holder — one Ozzie Smith, who it's safe to say is quite the elite defender — is fellow St. Louis Cardinal Yadier Molina. The longtime backstop has piled up 10 All-Star nominations and nine Gold Glove awards throughout his illustrious career, and though he's seen by some as a fringe Hall of Famer, this metric might just boost his chances in a big way.
The stat here is FanGraphs' "Def," which is described as follows:
Defense (Def) is the combination of two important factors of defensive performance: value relative to positional average (fielding runs) and positional value relative to other positions (positional adjustment). In order to properly evaluate a player’s defensive value, you need to know both factors and adding them together and providing it on the site saves you a bit of legwork.
...There is no reason why you should use Def instead of looking at fielding runs and the positional adjustment separately, but if you want a single measure of overall defensive value, our Def stat does the trick. The important thing to remember is that all of the leading defensive metrics (UZR, DRS, TZ, etc) are presented relative to the average defender at that position. This means that a +10 defender in left field is 10 runs better than the average fielder in left field. A +10 defender at shortstop is 10 runs better than the average shortstop. These are not equal because the average shortstop is a better defender.
Related
Def, as it is explained, removes the positional aspect of some of those metrics and makes it as close as we have to a catch-all number to define every player's defensive value on the diamond. And now, Yadi has compiled more Def than anyone else in the history of the game. Here are the top 12 names under that metric:
1. Yadier Molina: 377.0
2. Ozzie Smith: 375.3
3. Brooks Robinson: 359.8
A brief pause, here: are these three names not what you'd expect at the top of a list like this? Just wait... it gets a little bit less "expected" as you go further down.
4. Mark Belanger: 345.6
5. Ivan Rodriguez: 320.0
6. Cal Ripken: 310.1
7. Russell Martin: 306.6
8. Luis Aparicio: 302.7
9. Joe Tinker: 288.7
10. Brian McCann: 288.3
11. Andruw Jones: 278.8
12. Rabbit Maranville: 278.4
Some other names known for their defense — Omar Vizquel, Bill Mazeroski and Greg Maddux, to name a few — also appear in the top 50. It appears to be a stat that truly does represent some of the best defensive players in the game, with positional neutrality. I personally wouldn't have expected Brian McCann to rank as a top ten defensive player of all time, but what do I know? I certainly can't calculate all these metrics myself.
We're not sure exactly when Molina passed The Wizard of Oz on the list, just that he did (h/t Reddit user Cragic_tomedy for the find). Maybe it was during this play, which is still one of the better examples of pure confidence and talent that I've seen.
Related
Baseball Reference doesn't quite rank Molina as high, giving him 25.7 career dWAR (17th of all time) and 149 total zone runs as a catcher, the most among active backstops and the second most at the position in history, behind only Ivan Rodriguez. Still, if defense means anything — and it does — Molina's case for Cooperstown is becoming more rigid by the day.
LISTEN on the Audacy App
Sign Up and Follow Audacy Sports
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram