The Best Fielding Second Basemen

We move today to the best three-year peaks of defensive play by Giant second basemen, as measured by baseball-reference.com’s, rfield. I explained my methodology here, and looked at catching and first base peaks here and here.

While the list of top-ten first base peaks was composed of two players, the second base list includes six:

We see three tiers of defensive peaks at the keystone. The Giants enjoyed excellent defense on the right side of their infield in the 1930s, with Bill Terry at first and Critz and then Whitehead at second. (Whitehead’s peak excludes 1938, when he sat out the whole season after an emergency appendectomy on the first day of spring training followed by a nervous breakdown.) Frank Frisch has the third best peak at second, and only has one entry because he spent so much of his Giants career in the 1920s playing at third and short as well. He only reached the 75% threshold at second base over one three-year period. He was, without doubt, one of the best defensive infielders in baseball history, excellent at second, third and short.

The quality of the defensive peaks falls significantly after Whitehead, though, and we have two appearances by Robby Thompson sandwiched around a peak from Davey Williams. A further falloff occurs for the final three of the top ten, with a peak from Thompson at eighth, and peaks by Jeff Kent at ninth and tenth. (If we had an eleventh spot, Thompson would claim that, too.)

The importance of infield defense to winning is often spoken about by front offices, managers, players and analysts.  We have some circumstantial evidence here — eight of these ten second base peaks include seasons in which the Giants won the National League pennant.