Lookout Landing: Hey You Know Whose Defense Sucks? Ours

To date, the Mariners have turned 19 fewer balls in play into outs than you’d expect given their groundballs/fly balls/line drives against. This has cost them ~15 runs and goes a long way towards explaining why the team ERA is higher than the team FIP despite a pretty good strand rate and a better-than-average number of infield flies. That’s really bad.

Not convinced that defense matters? While screwing around at one point over the weekend, Matthew and I saw that the difference in BABIP against for the 2001 and 2007 Mariners was 57 points. Over a full season, 57 points of BABIP equals about 250 balls in play, or somewhere between 175-200 runs. 175-200 runs. From defense alone. Now, granted, the 2001 Mariners were kind of historically awesome with the glove, but the difference between even just a “normal” good and a “normal” bad defense can easily be 6-10 wins. That’s huge. Just look at the Rays’ turnaround - this sort of thing can make a world of difference.