Even the players think Brandon Crawford is underrated

“McDeep Dive” is our new series that spotlights one Giants player every day for a week. We’ll move backwards and forwards through time, look at on the field stuff, off the field stuff, and see if we can learn something new about them. Here’s part two of our look at Brandon Crawford.

The Athletic ran an informal player poll on Monday morning that covered a series of questions. One of them asked which player was the most underrated in the game. Brandon Crawford did not receive the top vote for the distinction, but he did receive multiple votes, and it wasn’t the only time his name appeared in the article.

10.5% of the players polled (which was, by happenstance, a body largely made up of NL players) also declared him to be the best defender in the game, his vote total only behind Andrelton Simmons and Nolan Arenado. This is quite a high level of esteem. It means that, to a large degree, what we’ve always known about his glove is actually fairly well known by his peers.

And, actually, it’s one of the few times where the players and “the fans” seem to agree, as FanGraphs’ nebulous defensive rating system has labeled him a plus-plus defender throughout his career. By their calculations, he’s been worth 93.5 runs over the course of his career, which means that, just based on his glove alone, he’s won the Giants about an extra 9-9.5 more games over 8 seasons, so, about a game per season.

Of course, his being “underrated” stems from the appreciation of his defensive wizardry, but as Sami noted in yesterday’s dive, he’s also had some big, big hits over his career.

Here now, as always, some YouTube videos to support what we already knew:

And don’t forget about this post from last week.

We’re just a few hours away from getting the chance to see him hog the Giants’ spotlight for the first time ever.