The Phillies Didn't Just Beat the Astros on the Scoreboard, But on Defense Too

The Philadelphia Phillies executed all the plays they needed to en route to a World Series Game 1 win over the Houston Astros.

Author:
Ben Silver
Oct 29, 2022 5:00 PM EDT

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Philadelphia Phillies

The discrepancy between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros on defense is obvious to anyone with eyes.

The Astros have more Gold Glove nominations and sit atop the leaderboards for just about every defense statistic. They have 101 more defensive runs saved than the Phillies.

That estimates Houston won 10 more games than the Phillies on defense alone.

Even the more conservative OAA is no kinder to the Phillies, who total them at -37, worse even than their -34 DRS. The Astros, meanwhile, led all American League teams with 31 outs above average.

So naturally, as the World Series has come around, the Phillies thoroughly out-played the Astros in Game 1 of the World Series on the field. Neither team made any errors, but we shouldn't be chained to such an antiquated stat as a measure of defense.

Instead we'll use an even more antiquated measure of defense: the eye test. Analytics are terrible for evaluating defense in a small sample size, even a full 162 games isn't normally enough to normalize values like DRS and OAA for a single player.

The Phillies biggest issue the entire season was making the routine plays, as evidenced by their paltry DRS and OAA totals. The main culprits were Kyle Schwarber, Nick Castellanos, Rhys Hoskins and Alec Bohm, all of whom frequently botched easy outs.

On Friday night, none made a single misplay.

The Phillies were never burned by bad defense. Though several runs scored for the Astros because the Phillies couldn't field soft groundballs, it was only due to bad positioning and lucky contact.

The inverse can be said for the Astros. On multiple occasions they were held scoreless because the Phillies made the plays.

The first of which came in the sixth inning with two outs when Bohm ranged to his left into foul territory and threw a cricket strike over to Hoskins for the out at first base. Had his throw sailed the Phillies first baseman, as it often did during the regular season, the Astros would have taken the lead.

Next it was Ranger Suárez's turn to flash the leather. As confident as he has been all-season, MLB didn't see fit to nominate him for Gold Glove after he fell short of the pitcher qualification threshold at 162.0 innings.

All the same, Suárez was on the national stage and showed off his glove anyways. Reminiscent of Cliff Lee in 2009 World Series Game 1, Suárez nonchalantly picked a one-hop bouncer out of the air, tossed it from his glove hand to his throwing hand and fired a strike over to Hoskins.

For the Astros, rookie Jeremy Peña, the Gold Glove nominee, had quite the adventure playing shortstop in his first World Series game. He botched an infield grounder that went off Bryan Abreu's glove, and allowed notorious speedster Schwarber to reach on what was ruled an infield single, but should have been an error.

Later in the ninth, he almost made the miscue of his life, dropping a pop-up as every father in Delco screamed, "Use two hands!"

Peña managed to catch the ball on the bobble, but surely made the Astros' hearts race a little faster.

Yet, the play of the night belonged to man who played worse defense than just about anyone else in 2022. On plays with a 65% catch probability, like the ball Castellanos caught to save the game for Philadelphia in the bottom of the ninth, the Phillies' right fielder was only 5-for-55 in the regular season.

But sprinting in and breaking into a slide, Castellanos made the play and saved the game, just as he did weeks earlier in the NLDS Game 1.

The Phillies didn't win Game 1 because they played spectacular defense, they won because they played good defense, fundamental defense, and fundamentals win ballgames.