Originally Posted on the Previous Iteration of Baseball.FYI by Jacob Kornhauser
We really are in the Golden Age of MLB defense. There are several generational defensive talents all active right now with the likes of Andrelton Simmons, Nolan Arenado, Kevin Kiermaier, Matt Chapman, and Yadier Molina all still playing. Simmons, more than the others, is a truly transcendent defensive talent. Barring serious injury or regression, he will likely go down as the most productive defensive player in the history of baseball.
Simmons’ career dWAR is 26.7, good enough for 14th all time after less than a decade in the majors. Ozzie Smith has baseball’s best dWAR with a 44.2 mark, nearly five ahead of the next closest player. It took Smith 19 years to accumulate that total, roughly 2.33 per season. Simmons is far outpacing Smith at a tick under 3 per year. But what makes him so dominant at shortstop, a domination at the position we haven’t seen outside of Smith and Cal Ripken Jr.? The first place you need to look is his tremendous range.
Even in an injury-riddled 2019 season, Simmons led American League shortstops with a 10.4 Ultimate Zone Rating, a sabermetric, which measures, among other things, a fielder’s range and compares the result (hit/out/error) to the average result on similar plays from the past. This means that Simmons saved more than 10 runs more than the “average” shortstop in the league. Of course, UZR is not the only stat category that highlights how historically great Simmons is.
Simmons has 193 career defensive runs saved. By contrast, Derek Jeter, who inexplicably won five Gold Glove awards in his 20-year career, had a -165 defensive runs saved mark. That ain’t great. In other words, Simmons has saved about half a season worth of runs more than Jeter. If you take a look at his 2019 spray chart, a “down year” by his standards, it’s easier to see what makes Simmons so special.
Those red dots are plays that essentially shouldn’t be possible to make. Yet Simmons made the play on those 1-10 percent chance plays nearly more often than he didn’t. Most of his non-play red dot plays were in shallow to normal-depth left field. He makes the hard plays look routine and makes the routine plays look downright boring. Unlike hitting, defense rarely slumps until a player starts to lose a step. Remarkably, Simmons is just 30 years old, so he doesn’t figure to lose that step for the next several years. In his nine seasons, Simmons has posted an overall WAR of 36.3, 26.7 of which is from his defense. In other words, he likely wouldn’t be in the league anymore if it weren’t for his defensive prowess.
On his current pace, Simmons will become the most valuable defender in MLB history within the next six seasons, passing the likes of Smith, Brooks Robinson, Ripken, Ivan Rodriguez, and Omar Vizquel in the process. It can be easy to overlook Simmons since he plays with the best player in baseball in Mike Trout as well as the sport’s most dynamic superstar in Shohei Ohtani, but let’s appreciate what we have in Simmons while we’ve still got it. After all, by the time we’re looking back on his career, we’ll likely be calling him the greatest defensive player to ever put on a uniform.