the cardinals “backup” middle infielders, Joe Thurston and Brian Barden have been outstanding.

Thurston’s UZR/150 at second base so far this year is +22.8 and he is sitting pretty at .364 wOBA. Meanwhile, Barden has been around 0 at SS on defense (and ridiculously good at third), while he has already contributed 4.3(!) runs with the bat. Combined, the two of them have almost paid for Khalil Greene’s salary contributing around 1.1 WAR.

Also, they have Brendan Ryan as another backup SS and he has a career UZR/150 of 12.4 (though supposedly his defense has been bad this season so far), and Tyler Greene was recently called up to pick up the slack.

Skip Schumaker has recieved less than 2/3 of the innings at second base so far this season, and Greene has been getting plenty of time off, playing in only 17 of 25 games this season. They are eminently replaceable now and will either turn it around or not. Either way they will fail to be worth -80 runs on defense this season.

IIRC schumaker was about minus4 runs very early in the season (best data I can find in 8 seconds of searching says he was -2.9 on april 13th), after the first week of the season (7 games). If that’s the case, the fact that he’s STILL only a net minus 4 runs after 24 games means that he’s trending the right way, so there’s hope. he’s still only been a second baseman for about 2 months.

Caveat, because of MLB’s weird scheduling this year I’ve only been able to see about 2/3 of the games (despite paying for both extra innings AND mlb.tv), but I’ve read almost every game thread comment at VEB, and the folks there aren’t prone to pulling punches when someone flubs a defensive play. And he’s made some amazing plays on pop flies- I’m not sure how UZR handles those, because it’s such a black box. I’m eagerly awaiting the billjamesonline update with 2009 data, because they use dewan’s system which includes FB, Gb and DP data.

Anyway, you also omitted the fact that by UZR, Cesar Izturis has been -1.1 over that same time period, so he’s not exactly tearing it up himself. The overall difference between khalil and Izturis so far has been 0.1 win, which is pretty irrelevant; it’s way to early to say the greene trade was bad. They paid more for greene, but he has a potential upside which is pretty exciting.

Also, for the thousandth time or so, I’ll reiterate that the fact that the “UZR” used at fangraphs isn’t an open formula AFAIK, making the whole thing a little sketchy. Historical data seems to change pretty regularly. Until there is some kind of baseline + change log, analysts should not take it too seriously.

except first base, that guy has to go

I have watched most of the games this year, and he seems to make all the plays that a normal 2B would make. And because he has a very strong arm he has made a few plays that I don’t think a 2B would normally have made.

I think his defense has been fine. Now SS has been horrific and I didn’t need FanGraphs to tell me that. Just watch a game or two and Greene just keeps making mistakes, plus he’s not hitting now either. Awesome, so glad the cardinals went dumpster diving for a SS

1) It doesn’t come close to measuring the true talent level of a player because it is such a small sample size
2) The error bars in UZR-type metrics are exaggerated in such a small sample size

Mitchel Lichtman actually suggested taking the preseason projections for each player, and extrapolating them to the amount of innings those players have at their positions. His final numbers had the Cardinals infield at +12 so far.

remember i am one of you.

trading for khalil greene was a good idea, but his defense has been declining for two consecutive seasons, and going on three so far.

skip schumaker is a bad defensive 2b. i like the idea of moving him there, it’s innovative but it’s probably not going to work.

sure, the usual caveats apply. all i’m saying is to this point, the middle infield defense has sucked and probably will continue to suck for the reasons i just mentioned.

Schumaker has been better than I thought he would be at 2B. Before the season started I thought he would be a negative 20 to 30 run player defensively. I think he can be better than that though. If you dig a little deeper at his UZR numbers you see that all his negative value has been at the expense of his range runs. Which will improve with time and practice. Now if you look at his RF/9 it is 5.3 which is excellent for a 2B when Mark Ellis has 5.7.

 I am much more concerned about when he goes back to LF. He has looked right out bad at times on simple pop ups and catches. I think he is concentrating so much on being a 2B that putting him in LF is a determent.

This overall is probably the worst fielding Cardinal team that I have seen in a long time. We are normally in the top third at least of teams in terms of fielding. I think Oquendo going to the WBC didn’t help at all. Hopefully over time this starts to level off. I am concerned about Khalil though. He really needs to step up his game. He looks lazy out there and his range is pitiful. But LaRussa does some goofy switches out there that completely fail so he needs to take some of the blame there.

In the end it is honestly too early to being talking about Defensive stats in any serious continuation to me.