Who Was the Best at Playing the Field?

After the passing of Orioles’ legendary manager Earl Weaver before the season began, I found myself spending a good amount of time scrolling through the rosters of those dynasty clubs from Baltimore in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It shouldn’t surprise you that the name of Mark Belanger kept showing up, considering he spent 16 years with the O’s while playing some of the most defensively magnificent shortstop that baseball has ever seen.

Belanger has always fascinated me, though I never got the chance to actually see him play. I grew up a National League fan and it was only as his career was winding down in the early 1980s that my adult-onset obsession with the game of baseball was beginning. As a result, my understanding of Belanger’s contribution to the game is limited to the more sophisticated modern estimates of defensive value.

The most widely respected of these retrospective defensive metrics, Baseball Reference’s “Rfield” measurement (which uses the very popular Total Zone to measure range) credits Belanger with the best defensive season for a shortstop in the history of the game:

Greatest defensive seasons since 1920

Belanger stands out from almost all this group.  In fact, he and Darin Erstad are the only members of the group who are neither currently in the Hall of Fame nor otherwise bound for it. So, as a tribute to all the potentially forgotten Erstads and Belangers in the darker corners of baseball history, I wanted to dedicate a few blog entries to shedding light upon more of these elite but unsung defensive superstars, particularly those who played for the Giants.

Of course, I want to do this without championing the ever-lurking “fluke” defensive season. Even the best of our modern defensive metrics can be occasionally seduced into granting undue credit or blame to a fielder in smaller samples. One solution to this problem might be to instead celebrate the greatest defensive peaks in history, rather than individual seasons.

Since three seasons of defensive statistics are generally considered as reliable as a full season of offense, I compiled a list of the best consecutive three year defensive peaks as determined by Baseball Reference, using the following criteria:

• Each three-year peak required at least 70 percent of the player’s team’s games played at the position in question.
• For catchers I made the requirement just 65 percent of their team’s games.
• Players were ranked by their defensive runs per 150 games from their three-year period to account for the differences in the length of season from the different eras.
• I also limited this search to the live ball era.

Greatest three year defensive peaks since 1920

Alas, not a single Giant among this group! (Bonds was a Pirate 1989-91.)

Belanger hangs onto the top spot for shortstops with his remarkable stretch of defensive excellence from 1975-1977. Albert Pujols, Brooks Robinson, and Barry Bonds also maintain defensive supremacy at their respective positions, but Gary Carter, Frankie Frisch, Darin Erstad, and Ichiro all prove they were not up to the task of sustaining their defensive wizardry over the course of multiple seasons.

So having explained my goal and method, I’ll spend the rest of this series of posts discovering just which Giants had the highest defensive peaks at each position.  Which Giants were the best defenders?