MLB unveiled the Gold Glove Award finalists this morning over on X, The Everything Evil app but also took the time to compile the list in a post on their main site. This year, two San Francisco Giants
have entered the finalists round: Logan Webb and Patrick Bailey.
Bailey should come as no surprise. He’s one of the more valuable players in all of baseball simply because of his defense. If you drop the threshold for plate appearances, he tops the leaderboard for defensive value, according to FanGraphs. By the SABR organization’s SABR Defensive Index (SDI) rating, he’s just third in the NL, behind Fernando Tatis Jr. and Ke’Bryan Hayes and you can safely assume that’s because of playing time. The two ahead of him played in 20 and 17 more games, respectively. I mention the SDI number because it’s part of determining the winner. As MLB.com writes:
To determine the winners at the nine standard positions, the 30 MLB managers and up to six coaches from each team vote from a pool of players in their league, excluding players from their own team. These votes comprise 75% of the selection total, with the SABR Defensive Index counting for the other 25%.
Given all that, it would seem that Patrick Bailey is in line to win his second consecutive Gold Glove Award.
Meanwhile, there’s a tiny bit of irony in Logan Webb being the top pitcher defensively (according to SDI) in the year the famous groundballer led the league in strikeouts. His 53.2% groundball rate was not only way off from his career rate heading into the season (58%!) it was “only” 7th amongst qualified starters. And yet his +2.9 SDI is an astonishing turnaround for his career. Last season, he was sixth-worst among qualified starters with -0.9. The season before that, he was fifth-worst with -1.5.
So, an offseason spent on working on that part of this game definitely seems to have helped. We can imagine that J.P. Martinez had some influence on that, but it also does appear that Buster Posey was able to run a team in a way that got a lot of buy in to the extent that players improved in other areas without sacrificing their core talent. Bailey was tasked with managing the pitching staff, and he never lost track of his defense — indeed, he improved there, too.
If you’re wondering why Matt Chapman’s name hasn’t come up yet, it’s because he didn’t make it as a finalist despite registering the third-best SDI (+4.9) among third basemen, behind Hayes and Ryan McMahon (+5.0). Matt Shaw’s measly +0.9 (9th-best among 3B) made the cut, and it’s plausible that over the final five weeks of the season Shaw’s number rose (SABR only provides the index score through August 10th). From FanGraphs’ Defensive Runs Above Average, Chapman’s +5.9 is 3rd in NL, too. Shaw’s +1.5 is 5th. So, this has to be a playing time issue — only, Chapman (128) played in two more games than Shaw (126). So, look, grab those pitchforks. Matt Chapman was robbed or the rest of the league is really down on the guy for some reason.
As for the rest of the lineup, the Giants didn’t have anyone qualify for first base or second base and Willy Adames hit the index with a score of -1.2 0(fifth-worst; meanwhile, FanGraphs: +9.6), Heliot Ramos was the worst qualified left fielder according to SABR (-6.4). For comparison’s sake, Michael Conforto was fourth-worst at -1.1. Ramos was six times worse than Michael Conforto in the field? I guess I can kind of believe that… I don’t want to, but maybe I can. Anyway, Jung Hoo Lee was the worst centerfielder (-9.0) and Mike Yastrzemski was sixth-best (+1.2), so it’s safe to say that the Giants have a lot of work to do on defense.
Despite all the negatives, we’re not losing our minds: Patrick Bailey is an elite defender and Logan Webb’s overall game took a step forward this season.
