Third base: Pedro Feliz (really!)

Editor's note: OK, we're back on with our best defensive players series. I'm looking for this year's best defensive players, and I'm using common statistics, the super secret information I have received from John Dewan (author of The Fielding Bible), scouting reports from various people I know around the game and my own observations.


Every single time Pedro Feliz throws the ball to first base, I anticipate that he has overthrown the third baseman. I noticed this on about Day 3 of the Bonds chase. There would be a grounder hit to third, I would be half-heartedly paying attention, Feliz would scoop it up and throw the ball and my mind would immediately go, “Oh man, that’s in the stands.”

And the ball would plunk in the first baseman’s glove, shoulder high. Every time.

The first couple of times this happened, I didn’t think much of it. And then I realized it was a constant – there is something about Feliz’s throwing motion that (to me, anyway) makes it look like the ball slipped out of his hands and it will soar high. I asked a scout friend about this, and he said that he had not noticed that (actually he said: “It’s possible you could use a vacation,”), but HE had noticed that Feliz has a funny way of setting his feet when he throws. He said that Feliz looks a little bit off balance when he as he makes the exchange from glove to throwing hand – he just isn’t very smooth.

I asked a different scout about this theory, and he said he had not noticed that at all. HE thought Feliz was fairly steady at third but he, “lacked range.” “He doesn’t have very good instincts, especially to his right,” this scout said.

I bring up these three conflicting views about Pedro Feliz because statistically there is absolutely and positively no doubt that Feliz is the best defensive third baseman in baseball. None. For you traditionalists, he has the best fielding percentage. For the Bill James lover in all of us, he has the highest fielding range. For those looking for a little bit of a statistical edge, he has the best zone rating. And for those, like me, who love John Dewan’s plus/minus system, Feliz is FAR AND AWAY the best in baseball.

And yet, there is something about the way Feliz plays that keeps most people from believing this. Hell, I have a hard time believing it. As I look through the various scouting reports I have on the guy, the best I’ve found is that he’s “reliable” at third. I’ve found others who think he’s a below average third baseman.

This might get at the core purpose of this defensive series – it’s just plain hard to judge defense by what you see. Bill James has often said that if we didn’t keep trustworthy offensive numbers, we would likely not be able to tell much difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter, a 25 homer guy and a 20 homer guy, a 100 RBI guy and an 80 RBI guy and so on. I think this is true, though I would say there are exceptions here – I do think that, in a very short period of time, we would realize that Jason LaRue can’t hit.

Tangent: This year, in 127 at-bats, LaRue is hitting .157. That would be a 1 followed by a 5 followed by a 7. Now, many people have wondered why LaRue keeps playing on a fairly regular basis, and I don’t have a particularly intelligent answer for this; I do have a theory. I think it may have something to do with the regret the Royals feel for not going into the National League a few years ago when they had a chance. Since they cannot have their pitchers hit, they are doing the next best thing.

Two other points about LaRue:

1. He hit .194 in 191 at-bats last year. So that means that in his last 318 at-bats, LaRue is hitting .179. The last guy to get 300 at-bats in ONE season and hit that badly … the great Rob Deer in 1991. He hit .179 in 448 at-bats. Deer did bang 25 homers (13 more than LaRue) and walk 89 times (50 more than Larue). Before that, you have to go back to 1974.

2. Tony La Russa made big news by hitting his pitcher eighth. So where was the national media when Buddy Bell hit LaRue seventh?

The point is we DO have offensive statistics (and pitching statistics) that people generally trust. And while it’s certainly true that even those statistics don’t tell the whole story, and people do seem to think that A-Rod’s RBIs are somehow less filling than Jeter’s or whatever, nobody disagrees that, say, Albert Pujols can hit.

Well, that’s the kind of defensive year that Pedro Feliz seems to be having. He’s having an Albert Pujols defensive year. He leads the league in pretty much every statistic. But because people generally feel that defensive statistics are misleading, inconclusive, incomplete or flat stupid, I suspect most people do not believe in Pedro Feliz.

* * *

Something about awe and the arms of third basemen: I played third base at Royals fantasy camp, in large part because, well, I’ll tell you the story.

First, though, I am about to brag about an athletic talent I have, and I feel it is important to preface this by saying that I am fully away that I am a fat slob. I’m short, I have no jump shot, I was slow even in high school when I weighed 135 pounds, I have brutal eyesight, I can’t hit a golf ball into the air, I fell off a horse the one time I tried to ride, I can’t really skate, and I have never, to my recollection, won a game of pool when the other guy (or girl) did not scratch on the eight ball. So I cherish the very few athletic skills I was born with. These are two:

1. I have always had a ferocious first serve in tennis. I rarely get it in. But when I do, it’s a monster. It was clocked at 103 mph at one of those “How fast is your serve?” booths they have at tennis matches (trust me, they have them). And I wasn’t using my racket there, and the booth was crowded – I’m pretty sure I could have hit 110.

2. I’m a good fielder.

The second talent was hard earned. I have mentioned, time and again, my hero worship of Duane Kuiper and Buddy Bell – it was their fielding ability that captured me. I would go to our little basement in South Euclid and spend hour after hour after hour throwing the ball against the wall and fielding the grounders that bounced back. I really did make myself a good defender. I once went an entire Little League season at second base without making a single error. Now, to be fair, this is partly because except for the one or two lefties in the league, nobody in our league really hit the ball to second base. Cleveland kids, for whatever reason, were pull-crazy. But the point stands.

Of course when I went to fantasy camp, I had no idea how my childhood fielding skills would stand up. It had been more than 20 years since I had played in a hardball game. That was a lot of pasta ago. I was standing by third base and George Brett was working with some guy in the cage. The guy ripped (well, sort of ripped) a hard grounder to my left. I stepped, lunged, and scooped the ball smoothly. Two things happened* (PG-13 Language approaches):

1. George Brett shouted, “Holy shit!”
2. George Brett shouted: “Holy shit!”

No, that’s not one thing. That’s TWO things. First, George Brett, one of the two greatest third basemen ever, a man who towered over the childhood of everyone my age, the guy who hit the pine tar homer, the guy who won batting titles in three decades, the guy who almost hit .400, the guy who hit three homers in a playoff game, the greatest clutch hitter probably of the last 50 years, the king of Kansas City … GEORGE BRETT was stunned enough by my defensive play to unleash the holy expletive.

And second, well, OK, yeah, it’s just one thing. But I wanted to bask in it for an extra minute.

Anyway, after that people saw me as a third baseman (even though I had always played second base). So I went out there and the first play, someone hit a slow roller down the third base line. I charged, scooped, and threw him out. I’m making that sound a lot smoother than it was for brevity’s sake. Anyway, that got my manager and friend Frank White (eight-time Gold Glover, you know) to whistle in admiration. I’m telling you, just for those two moments alone this camp was worth the 3,500 bucks I paid. True, my kids will have to go to Community College but still …

Now, I wasn’t really bringing all this up to dwell in the few pathetic moments of glory that a 40-year-old man feels playing at a baseball fantasy camp. That just sort of happened naturally. No, I was bringing it up to say that I played third base, and I’m a pretty good fielder, and I can tell you first hand that the throw from third to first is like the drive from Jacksonville to Miami. It’s MUCH longer than you think it is. It is slightly longer than one of the runways at LaGuardia.

I mean I have a reasonable arm (as represented by my tennis serve) and I made that throw for three days (or, more accurately, I’d didn’t come close to making that throw), and now I simply don’t look at third basemen in the same way. One of the constant themes of this blog – and my general feelings about sports – is that we should, in the immortal words of that philosopher John Cougar Mellencamp, “hold on to 16 as long as we can (changes come around real soon make us women and men).” That is, every so often it’s good to notice awesome things. This comes naturally when you’re young. But as you get older, you sometimes need to stop and remember that a lot of really cool stuff that happens in sports, that there is nothing routine about routine plays, that it really is a ridiculously long throw from third to first.

So now I watch the way Adrian Beltre just sort of sidearm flips the ball across the diamond, I see the way Scott Rolen charges a bunt and throws off his right foot, I see the way David Wright dives, gets up, and just HAMMERS his throw over there, and I feel a little bit of that childhood awe.

OK, here are my Top 5 defensive third basemen:
1. Pedro Feliz
2. Scott Rolen
3. Ryan Zimmerman
4. Adrian Beltre
5. David Wright