Francisco Lindor: Most Valuable Rookie

Francisco Lindor was beaten heavily by Carlos Correa of the Astros in the Rookie of the Year vote this season, largely due to his impressive power numbers. This was completely ignoring more all-encompassing stats that showed Lindor was the second most valuable short stop in all of baseball (4.6 WAR behind only the Giants Brandon Crawford), defensive stats that showed he saved more runs than any AL short stop and strictly offensive stats that show he was just behind Correa at the plate (133 wRC+ to 128).

There is no question that Correa had an incredible season and he deserved credit for such, but the value that Lindor brought to the Indians can’t be underestimated.

On June 13th, the Indians were six games out of the AL Central lead in fourth place. They had lost six of their last ten and were 29-32. After finishing the 2014 season as the second worst defense in baseball (ahead of only the Astros), they were the 9th worst in April, allowing 2.2 more runs than the average defense and things got worse in May, giving up 6.7 more runs on defense than the average team and falling to 27th in the Majors. The pitching staff, who were a fantastic unit all season, also were effected by this poor play, particularly the lack of range by Lonnie Chisenhall at third and Jose Ramirez at short.

Enter, Francisco Lindor.

The tables above show just how much of a difference the Indians defense made during the second half of the season. On the left, the ERA of the entire pitching staff, starting and relief, is compared to the FIP in the same month. with an average defense, these numbers should be identical, but as we’ve already stated, the Indians didn’t start with an average defense. In the two months prior to Lindor’s advancement, Indians pitchers averaged allowing .59 more runs per nine innings than they should have based on their defense eliminated stats. In the three plus months after, they allowed .15 less runs per nine. While their FIP did not improve throughout the season, the staff’s ERA made large improvements ever single month from the moment Lindor joined the team until the end of the season.

Just to cross reference, the table to the right shows how the Indians big four starters fared before and after the advent of Lindor. Different from FIP, batting average on balls in play generally rounds out to about .300 for the league and varies little over the long term. Great pitchers can decrease this a little and great hitters increase, but in general there are two things that effect BABIP more than anything else, luck and defense.

Considering random luck, one would expect different pitchers and hitters to get lucky at different times. Being random, there shouldn’t be any correlation between the numbers. There is certainly some correlation between the numbers above, though. Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar are all tremendous pitchers who finished among the top ten in the AL in WAR this year yet they all allowed a BABIP of well above .300 before Lindor was called up. All three and Trevor Bauer, who was significantly luckier during the first few months were well below the league average in the second half.

More balls are hit to short stop than anywhere else, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that an increase in defensive quality there over any other position would make the biggest difference. In addition, by adding a player with great range, less is needed by the third and second basemen, who can both focus on making better plays on the balls they still need to reach. When looking to add a player with great range, the Indians couldn’t have done better than Lindor and while the many highlights showed this all season, FanGraphs can put a number on this and have stated that Lindor saved 10 runs more than average based on his range alone. Using their Inside Edge Fielding system, Lindor made 66.7% of 27 ‘Unlikely’ plays (made 10-40% league wide) and 77.8% of 27 ‘Even’ plays (generally made 40-60% of the time), well above his fellow short stops around the league.

Lindor wasn’t the only defensive improvement made through the year, but he was the one with the most significant number of innings played. He was also the one who made the biggest improvement over his predecessor as Jose Ramirez was worth -2 Defensive runs saved during his 384 innings at short stop last year. Lindor at 10 DRS in 865 innings could have been expected to have been six runs better than Ramirez during those early months.

Of course, defense is only half the game and what made Lindor so valuable to the team was his offensive attack as well. Unlike his defense, it did take a little while for Lindor to adjust to Major League pitching, but beginning on about July 8th, he was as good as any short stop in baseball with the bat and better than essentially all his teammates.

The fact that the Indians offense improved as the season went along isn’t questionable and while it was fun to blame the success on the removal of Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn, that probably wasn’t the case. Swisher barely played during the first half of the season and Bourn was playing much better in the weeks leading up to his trade. In addition, his replacement, Abraham Almonte, wasn’t an extreme improvement over Bourn.

Lindor from July 8th on, however, was both an incredible improvement upon Ramirez and his own first month. While removing Bourn may not have been that big of a deal, taking him out of the top of the lineup and replacing him with Lindor was. Instead of Bourn hitting lead-off, striking out in 23.5% of at bats and batting .180/.254/.213, the Indians moved Jason Kipnis to lead-off and had Lindor put together a .299/.341/.450 line out of the two hole, striking out in just 15.7% of at bats. Replacing the affectionately called ‘automatic out’ with the spark plug that is Lindor was the biggest change the Indians made during the season and was almost enough by itself to push the Indians into the play-offs.

After the terrible start, the Indians finished the year at 81-80, a 52-48 record after the initial rise of Lindor. They only gained one game in the standings, but were nearing the Twins at second and with some more time for Lindor being a terrific rotation and possibly a healthy Michael Brantley, there is reason to believe the Indians would have. More than any other player, Lindor should give Tribe fans optimism going into 2016 and for many years to come.

It is because of this that the Indians could go out of their norm and consider guaranteeing Lindor an extension well before the time this would generally be considered. To look at all aspects of an extension, Kevin Gall will continue this discussion later today.