| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Smart Stats for 2003, Part III: The Defense | About the author, Boyd Nation |
Publication Date: August 26, 2003
Defensive Efficiency
This week, we conclude my annual series on smarter player and team analysis stats, moving on to the defense. The best metric for defensive analysis that I've found is something called Defensive Efficiency, which is a team measure of the percentage of balls in play that are converted to outs. If you'll look back at that link to last year's definitions, you'll see that I include versions of the formula which do and do not take errors into account -- in a perfect world, they'd be ignored, but variable scoring in this world makes the second version useful.
The top 25 teams, according to the basic formula:
EFF1 EFF2 Team 1 0.713 13 0.646 Vermont 2 0.713 2 0.672 Stanford 3 0.708 9 0.650 Georgia Tech 4 0.706 5 0.654 Virginia Commonwealth 5 0.705 170 0.596 Arkansas-Pine Bluff 6 0.705 3 0.671 Rice 7 0.705 18 0.643 LeMoyne 8 0.704 6 0.653 Florida Atlantic 9 0.704 1 0.674 Long Beach State 10 0.702 50 0.631 Southern 11 0.699 25 0.641 Texas 12 0.699 16 0.644 Florida State 13 0.699 17 0.644 Fordham 14 0.698 26 0.641 North Carolina-Wilmington 15 0.697 22 0.642 Birmingham-Southern 16 0.696 32 0.637 Baylor 17 0.696 46 0.631 Troy State 18 0.696 8 0.652 Cal State Fullerton 19 0.696 30 0.639 Mississippi 20 0.694 4 0.655 Mississippi State 21 0.694 36 0.634 Pittsburgh 22 0.694 23 0.642 Illinois 23 0.694 91 0.618 Stony Brook 24 0.694 7 0.652 Wichita State 25 0.693 15 0.644 Coastal Carolina
There's a theme emerging here. The top teams don't always fit into a predictable pattern as far as pitching and hitting stats go, although a good staff ERA is never a bad bet, but Texas was probably the best defensive team in the nation last year, and Rice and Stanford were both among the six best this year, with Fullerton not far behind. I'm not sure what the significance of this is, or whether the trend will hold up over a few years, but it could be that at the college level defense is as good an indicator of pure talent as anything.
As a cynical aside, for the second year in a row, UAPB's pitchers owe their scorer a steak.
And the bottom 10:
EFF1 EFF2 Team 276 0.616 256 0.554 Wofford 277 0.612 266 0.549 Drexel 278 0.607 279 0.535 Hawaii-Hilo 279 0.607 278 0.535 Hofstra 280 0.607 277 0.535 High Point 281 0.606 283 0.514 Maryland-Eastern Shore 282 0.605 276 0.537 IUPU-Fort Wayne 283 0.602 285 0.497 Chicago State 284 0.601 280 0.534 St. Peter's 285 0.594 282 0.523 Canisius
Just to put this in perspective, over half of the time a Chicago State opponent put the ball in play, he ended up on base.
Rather than put the full report in here, I'll include it in the Filing Cabinet for posterity.
If you're interested in reprinting this or any other Boyd's World material for your publication or Web site, please read the reprint policy and contact me
| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Smart Stats for 2003, Part III: The Defense | About the author, Boyd Nation |