2007 PCL Second Base range factors: How good of a defender is Jayson Nix?

by Rox Girl on Jan 17, 2008 11:07 AM MST in Rockpile Comment 7 comments

Baseball Reference's minor league pages have been very informative to me this off season, that site just keeps on getting better and better. But check this out:

Albuquerque: 5.01
Colorado Springs: 5.96

Jayson Nix: 5.96

Fresno: 4.97
Iowa: 4.87
Las Vegas: 4.82
Memphis: 4.77
Nashville: 4.77
New Orleans: 4.91
Oklahoma: 4.92
Omaha: 4.99
Portland: 4.98
Round Rock: 4.75
Salt Lake: 5.03
Sacramento: 4.96
Tacoma: 5.10
Tuscon: 4.80

No other player who logged more than fifty games at second base in the PCL had a range factor greater than 5.00. Think about that. Not only did Nix cover the most ground among second baseman in the PCL last season, he did so by nearly 20% over his closest competitor. Tucson as a team had 400 assists and 110 double plays at the position in 142 games, Nix had 404 assists and turned 124 DP's in 107 games. Furthermore, looking at the International League and all three AA leagues doesn't turn up anybody close either, so let's compare the numbers we can with Nix to the best in the NL last year, Chase Utley and Orlando Hudson as well as Dewan's Fielding Bible award winner Aaron Hill of the AL:

J. Nix G:107 PO:234 A:404 E:9 DP:124 .986 RFg: 5.96
C. Utley G:132 PO:289 A:372 E:10 DP:85 .985 RFg: 5.10 D's +/-: +22
O. Hudson G:137 PO:258 A:387 E:10 DP:96 .985 RFg: 4.91 D's +/-: +20
A. Hill G:160 PO:244 A:560 E:14 DP:114 .983 RFg: 5.13 D's +/-: +22

The games played might throw you off here, but Nix had roughly two thirds the playing time of Hill, so multiplying his counting stats by 1.5 gives you a rough idea of the kind of astronomical pace we was running at. Even factoring in that it strains credibility that he could have kept that up for another fifty-three games, Nix's 2007 season would project out to around a +30 with the glove. That's amazing, and if we get even something close to that next year he could be fifteen runs behind Kaz-Mat (+12) at the plate and still come out about even.

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Colorado Springs

Didn't Omar Quintanilla play a lot of 2nd base as well at Col. Springs last year?

Q has had the reputation of a great glove guy as well. He also has struggled to hit. Nix has the reputation of great glove guy. No doubt about that. Any Pro-Nix position has to start there. The Con-Nix side is his dismal hitting, until last year, when he hit the non-humidor altitude of Col. Springs (.292 BA in 439 ab's). Even Barmes (.299 BA in 428 ab's) and Q (.319 BA in 348 ab's and actually led the Sky Sox in batting average) hit well last year in Col. Springs.

To me the only reason Nix is ahead of Quintanilla for me at this point is Nix had 24 Stolen bases last year in AAA. You can't coach speed as the old cliche' goes.

2006 TIME magazine "Person of the Year"

by Redhawk on Jan 17, 2008 11:23 AM MST reply actions 0 recs

Q played 27 games there,

And in those he could be considered almost as good as Nix defensively. He's probably the second best defensive second baseman in the PCL, which would jive with how 2006 played out as well. That said, he's been a backup to Nix both years for a reason. Q would probably be in that +20 range over the course of a full season at second in the majors, still ten runs behind Nix. Barmes doesn't play second all that well, yet Q can also play a solid shortstop, so I'm coming back around to the position that the Rockies intend to trade Clint this Spring with Quintanilla our defensive utility guy.

Nix also hits for more power than both Q and Barmes -probably Giles as well- so added to baserunning and defense, that's three categories he's the better choice in. Basically, I think the only real questions at this point come down to how often he puts the ball in play, and how often he takes a walk, and frankly there's ample reason to be pessimistic on both fronts but not enough to equate him with Quintanilla or Barmes overall.

by Rox Girl on Jan 17, 2008 12:15 PM MST up reply actions 0 recs

Quintanilla

Great post about Nix's abilities with the glove.

But I have been dismissing Quintanilla and I'm not sure why. Q has a career .312 batting average (.319 last year) and a career OPS of .821 (.834 last year) compared to Nix .256(.312) and .720 (.793). The SB% for each player looks very similar. My impression is that Q is light-hitting, but his BB and K rates are much better, leading to a better OBP.

While Nix's RFg is unbelievable over the past couple of years (5.96 and 5.94 at 2B), his career 2B RFg = 5.4 to Q's 5.39 (5.41 and 5.48 the last 2 years).

While I'm not intending to undermine enthusiasm for Nix (his career numbers may not necessarily be very predictive of next year's performance), I'm just questioning why Q has been dismissed so when there seems to be evidence to suggest that he, too, might be able to fill in quite well. What am I missing? Is it a stretch to imagine that Nix could struggle in spring training offensively while Q jumps out to a .300? What happens then - are we sticking with Nix?

GO ROCKIES!

Really, really excited about 2008

by Just Hoping on Jan 17, 2008 11:47 AM MST reply actions 0 recs

Nix

B-ref has minor league fielding numbers now? Cool.

As far as this goes, though, there are a couple reasons not to get too excited. The first reason is that Nix's backups (mostly Q) did just as well as he did, which suggests that maybe he wasn't so outstanding after all. And the second reason is that range factor is as much a reflection of the pitching staff and the other fielders as it is of the fielder in question. Sky Sox pitchers, as a group, were about 160 strikeouts below the PCL average. That's 160 outs that somebody else has to record. And, on average, about 20% of outs recorded on BIP are on balls hit to 2B. So that's 32 assists that Nix recorded that we can attribute solely to the pitching staff's poor strikeout rate. We can probably dock him even further because it was a groundball staff (judging based on HR rates, since I can't find team G/F ratios), and because the Sky Sox allowed more baserunners than the average staff, thus resulting in more double play opportunities. Range factor is a stat that needs to be adjusted in about half a dozen different ways in order to have any meaning, and this is a perfect illustration of its flaws.

That said, all the adjustments in the world probably can't knock Nix down to anything less than 10 RAA or so, so this is certainly promising.

(Dammit, now I'm going to have to go through and develop a framework for making those adjustments. Life as a sabermetrician is hard sometimes.)

by Heltonfan on Jan 17, 2008 12:10 PM MST reply actions 0 recs

I figured there would probably have to be

some sort of adjustment, that's part of the reason I looked over several other leagues just to get a feel of how much of an anomaly Nix's numbers were relative to other league leaders at the position, and he still seemed to come out crazy good.

Minor League Splits has at least Colorado Springs' 2006 BIP numbers separated by position, so that might help. You can see by the 86 pop-outs at second compared to 61 at short that Nix probably does some Tulo-esque ball hogging, but there's still a lot of evidence pointing me to the conclusion that he's still an excellent fielder. The league as a whole had about 12.8% of balls in play hit to and 18% of outs recorded at second base, for Colorado Springs those numbers were 14.6% and 21.2%. A chunk of that disparity is probably the high GB (49.1% compared to 45.7%), low K (15.8% compared to the league's 17.5%) pitching staff, but you know a lot of the difference also has to do with the fielders in question.

The jump from what the RFg's were in Colorado Springs pre-Nix/Quintanilla is also substantial. Just going back to 2002 when Aaron Cook was on the team for a little while shows nobody at second coming close to the kind of numbers Nix and Q were putting up. Like you say, I don't figure how the adjustments will knock enough off of Nix's line to come up with any other conclusion than he's damn good.

by Rox Girl on Jan 17, 2008 1:04 PM MST up reply actions 0 recs

Okay, I did it

I went through and made my adjustments to the range factors. I've now developed a simple, probably highly inaccurate but still much better than nothing framework for evaluating minor league defense. I can't do catchers, and I have virtually no confidence in the numbers for first basemen, but, hey, it's something.

Nix comes out at 13 RAA. Without the K and G/F adjustments, he'd be +44. So as I suspected, this stuff makes a huge difference, but he still had a very good season.

As far as a defensive projection for Nix goes... Mark Ellis, the best defensive 2B on the planet, projects at +12 (that's how much you have to regress even major league ZR stats... minor league adjusted range factors, obviously, call for a much heavier regression). I haven't crunched these particular numbers yet, but off the top of my head, I'd say that I'd be okay with labeling Nix a +5 or so based on this one year of data. If he's got a longer history of this kind of performance (and I can now check that, albeit time-consumingly), we could obviously bump that number up.

by Heltonfan on Jan 17, 2008 11:22 PM MST up reply actions 0 recs