Does Dunn's defense really matter?

All I know is that in a playoff game I would scared out of my mind everytime a ball was hit or thrown to him. This teams strength is it’s pitching and defense first and foremost. If he isn’t a defensive liability than it would be great because the Giants have been needing that fourth place hitter. All that would matter than would be the asking price.

All this speaks to the advantage Al teams have by being able to carry a guy like Dunn on the roster while NL teams have to slot a 4th OF / PH specialist type in as a DH in world series games.

But looking at those numbers, it seems that less GB opportunities = less opportunity for Dunn’s defense to screw us

Your logic’s right on. Our staff doesn’t get many GB’s. It’s also worth mentioning we’re leading the league in K/9, which means even less opportunities. So yes, defense probably should be discounted to some degree, but that doesn’t mean you should conclude defense doesn’t matter. It still matters a lot.

I’ll just reiterate my thoughts:

Even if we talk about removing someone like Ishikawa straight up – I’m comfortable saying Ishikawa is probably somewhere like +20 runs better than Dunn defensively. He’s also pretty average offensively, meaning Dunn is AT BEST +30 runs better than Ishi offensively (he’s on pace for 30 this year, and I still think I have a strong case he should hit worse for the remainder of this year than he has, PLUS he should hit worse in AT&T, and his previous two years averaged about +30). So you’re talking about +1 win over the full course of the season. The other players you also mentioned are all and probably fairly similar to Ishikawa in overall value (~2 WAR players).

With 37% of the season left, you’re talking about a case that most likely will result in 0 additional wins (expected improvement – anywhere from 0 to .37 wins).

At this point in his career, Dunn is maybe a +25 hitter offensively. Let’s regress his D a little and call him a -10 defensive player. I’m gonna call Schierholtz a +15 defender and a -5 hitter. On the surface, that appears to bring us +5 runs. Aubrey Huff moving from 1B to a corner OF spot, coincidentally, costs us 5 runs (using positional adjustments for this). It’s a wash. Even adjusting Schierholtz down to a -10 hitter, we’re talking about 5 runs over a whole season, or what, 2 runs at the most over the last 2 months?

Maybe I’m overestimating our guys a little bit, maybe we should adjust for the fewer number of fielding opportunities….whatever we do, I’m having a hard time coming up with a number that shows Dunn as adding anything more than +1.4,1.5 WAR over the course of a full season to our alternative, and we’re 5 games away from having 1/3 of the season left….so best case scenario is we get an expected added win value of .5, .6 WAR – where we should think it’s more likely we get 1 win rather than 0, but not a certainty. I also think it’s not unreasonable to think the expected added win value is less than that, to where the most likely case is we don’t add a single win…..

Overall, I’d take Dunn, I think he adds something positive, if they wanted something like Bowker who we clearly hate and want no part of, sure, why not, but I don’t see how he justifies any sort of real prospect in return.

Now, if anyone has their own numbers, I’d like to see them. Also, similar to Change Up’s comment – Dunn provides more value to an AL team, so it just really doesn’t make sense for us to acquire him. In a rationally functioning market, assuming there’s some AL team out there with a need, that AL team should get more value by acquiring Dunn that us and thus be willing to give up more. By that logic, we HAVE to overpay to get him.

… and that’s the penalty for failure/reward for success.

When we say a fielder costs us 10 runs, what we mean is that every time he fails to make a play he gives the opposition addition resources to score runs (in the form of an extra baserunner and an extra out), and that an average offence would utilise those resouces to score an average of 10 runes against averag pitching/defence.

Except: the Giants do not have average pitching. They have exceptional pitching – our ERA is consistant at around 3.5 for the last season and a half, compared to the league average of 4.5. So, basically, given the same resources, our opponents only score 78% as many runs as the league average. So, roughly, an missed play by Dunn would only cost us 78% of what it would cost a league average team (it’s actually lower than that, because fewer baserunners also means that a higher percentage of plays are in bases empty/runner on 1st situations, where errors are less costly than with runners in scoring position) – essentially because the pitcher will bail him out a lot. Likewise, an extra play being made is only worth 78% (or less) of the benefit.

On top of that, the number ofs GBs does have a smaller, but still significant, effect.

Combining (a) the pitchers’ ability to bail him out, (b) the lower number of GBs, and © the lower proportion of high leverage (i.e. multiple runners etc) spots, somwhere in the region of 35% – 40% of his defensive failings should be hidden.

His batting, however, suffers no such penalty now that our offence is somewhere around league average.

On top of the number of runs added points, there’s the conversion to wins – WAR is also calculated on league averages – that 9 or 10 runs is worth a win (Fangraphs seems to be working on 9.7 this season). But with great pitching, you play in a lower run environment, so it becomes maybe 8.5 runs to a win.

Basically, I’m totally up for this. I think this is probably worth about 1.5 wins until the end of the season, and makes us a genuine post season threat too.

First, I think it should be known that Dunn would likely play most (if not all) of his starts at 1B, not in RF. His defense at first is not good, however, he doesn’t seem to be God-awful there this season. Last I saw, Fangraphs had him as -0.1 at 1B. (I could be wrong, though)

Second, can we please stop the “Yeah, but Dunn at first would put Huff in LF” argument. Huff has spent most of his time in LF this later portion of the season. It certainly looks like he’ll be out there with or without Dunn. So kill that noise.