Bruce Bochy Wants Rangers to be Fundamental

Data, both traditional and analytics-based, show that the Texas Rangers have ground to make up defensively next season.

Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy wants a fundamental baseball team, one that focuses on the little things.

That’s not what the Rangers were last season. With the new rules changes, one thing will absolutely have to get better next season and that’s the team’s overall defense.

The shift ban has been lauded as an elixir for certain types of hitters. In fact, Rangers shortstop Corey Seager may benefit the most of any hitter from the shift ban.

But the shift was not only a maneuver to take advantage of pull hitters. It was also designed to help hide average or below-average fielders.

In 2023, teams won’t be able to stack three infielders on one side of the field. They won’t be able to align infielders on the outfield grass, either.

That means developing a defense with fundamentals and range is important for every team in 2023, but especially the Rangers.

“That part of the game, the (fielding) range, working on that and spring training is going to be critical because they’ve got more ground to cover now,” Bochy said.

Those little things in the field eluded the Rangers in 2022, and that, in part led to the team’s awful record in one-run games — 15-34.

The Rangers’ below-average defense showed up in a numbers of ways, both in traditional baseball data and in deeper analytics.

In traditional data, the Rangers were below the league average in fielding percentage at .984. They were 22nd in the Majors. That’s a shade misleading because the league average was .985. The top fielding percentage was the St. Louis Cardinals’ .989. More telling was their defensive efficiency rating (.693). Again, it wasn’t far below the league average (.697) but well below the top end (Los Angeles Dodgers at .729). The Rangers also had the seventh-most errors of any team (96).

Get into deeper analytics and you see how that traditional data begins to connect. For instance, Baseball Info Solutions has a good plays/misplays runs above average stat designed to measure the number of runs above or below average the player was worth based on plays where they made an exceptional contribution or obviously misplayed the situation.

The Rangers had the second worst rating at minus-10. Only the Chicago White Sox were worse at minus-11. The Rangers also had just three defensive runs saved above average, indicating their defense didn’t make much of a difference in stopping runs from scoring, and the BIS data showing the Rangers paid for failing to make easy plays more often than gaining something for making exceptional plays.

Individually, Statcast has an Outs Above Average leaderboard, which is the “cumulative effect of all individual plays a fielder has been credited or debited with, making it a range-based metric of fielding skill that accounts for the number of plays made and the difficulty of them,” according to baseballsavant.com.

Of the 127 players that had a positive OAA (one ore better), just five were Rangers — second baseman Marcus Semien, shortstop Corey Seager, center fielder Leody Taveras, right fielder Adolis García and infielder/outfielder Josh Smith. Semien was the only one in the Top 40, ranked No. 36 with a plus-8 OAA. It’s probably no coincidence that Semien was the Rangers’ only Gold Glove finalist.

There are other areas when it comes to fundamentals where the Rangers must get better. But the shift ban exposes a potential opportunity for the Rangers to get better in an area that would benefit the entire team, especially if Texas contends for a playoff spot, as is the hope in 2023.

That works starts in February in Surprise.

“If you don't execute, that can cost you and that's the worst way to lose a ball game,” Bochy said. “The more you work at it, the more you master it, then it becomes second nature and there's no process involved, no thinking involved. You get it down enough that it just comes natural to you and that's where you want to be.”

---

You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard

Catch up with Inside the Rangers on Facebook and Twitter.