Last week, I wrote about my favorite awards non-contest this season, and there was a small discussion in the comments on the sustainability of the defensive improvements in Trea Turner. As we have more years of OAA/FRV, we can better study long-term field issues using data, so I want to quickly look at FRV improvements/descents to see if these changes are made. And, since this topic isn’t enough to give me a full-length treatment – at least not now, when I’m trying to get my playoff predictor utility ready for 2025 – and it’s been too long to comment, it seems like a good time for an unpopular Instagram Instagram©©.
I started every defensive season and someone played 800 innings in one position in a row. I’m here to see the corner outfield position as a different position just to make it as clean and simple as possible. Statcast defense is still a relatively new thing, so we only have 583 two-year individual players. Not enough to further break it down by age, position or component in a meaningful way, but enough to see the numbers on the bottom line. When we watched three years of running, we dropped to 277 individual players. Thank you 2020!
Among the 800 innings players in the same position for three consecutive seasons, this is the 30 biggest gains in the first and second years. I used FRV/1200 instead of RAW FRV.
Nearly two-thirds of the biggest modifiers had negative FRV numbers in the first season and averaged 10.8 points in the second season. Although FRV is clearly a turbulent number, these players successfully retained most of the year’s gains in the third season, with an average of 6.4 improvements, with only five players returning to the negative territory.
Turner made 11.7 improvements in FRV/1200 at 11.7 times, which would be ranked ninth on this list, while the second biggest improvement in shortstop, behind Tim Anderson 2017-2018. Turner has no special features here, as this is dedicated to three years of running and the 2026 season hasn’t happened yet. His current 2023-2024 1-year 2 earnings are 4.5 times – from -8.0 to -3.5 – so it is not enough to get the top 30 to top 30. It is worth noting, though, that Zips will be worth about 4.0 FRV/1200 in 2026, meaning he has maintained about half of his progress from last year to this season.
Now, deleted by:
The stories here are similar. From grade 1 to grade 2, the 30 largest disconnectors caused an average of 11.7 slides. Two outside the 30 initially were in the positive field, with only two players (Trevor Story and Evan Longoria) rebounding in the positive field of the third grade. Compared to the changes in the -11.7 season in the previous two seasons, the first two seasons of Year 3 are still at -7.9 seasons below -7.9 seasons. Again, the biggest drop usually still shows a serious deterioration to the defensive performance.
Despite my sample size concerns, I still have stickiness by age or position. Unfortunately, the results are not interesting. The sample size is too small to draw meaningful conclusions from this part of the exercise.
So, what does this mean? While you shouldn’t be using the latest player as some magical this-the-the-the-true-tauge numbers, the huge changes in performance make a lot of sense. This is good news for fans of Turner and the Philadelphia.
