Which Royals should win Gold Gloves?

Several Royals could take home some defensive hardware, but which are most deserving?

Rawlings announced the finalists for this year’s Gold Glove awards. These finalists include four Royals, with each having a chance to win their first Gold Glove.

An aside: it’s silly that they present these players as “finalists.” That implies that there’s another round of voting, when in reality the voting is completed and the players that are being presented are simply the top three finishers in voting. Anyway, I digress.

With the winners not being announced until November 3, let’s evaluate the case for each Royal to determine if they are worthy winners, or if we should be upset if they are snubbed.

Freddy Fermin, C

The Ferminator is up against two other catchers that are also looking to win their first Gold Glove: Seattle’s Cal Raleigh and Detroit’s Jake Rogers. The statistical comparison between the three is fascinating:

Raleigh is the only one of the three that spent most of the season as their team’s primary catcher, so he has a massive lead in innings caught. Bear in mind that DRS is a counting stat, so despite what looks like a near tie in that metric, Fermin actually comes out on top on a rate basis. By Statcast’s FRV, Rogers appears to be the clear winner. I generally have the most confidence in Statcast defensive metrics, but I’m not sure sorting the FRV leaderboard will be very predictive of the winner here. The reason for that? Pitch framing.

The Royals Review community’s favorite metric to hate, pitch framing factors heavily into most defensive models for catchers. This is not because they weigh framing too heavily, rather, this is a function of volume — catchers have far more opportunities to steal strikes than to throw out base-stealers or block balls in the dirt.

As such, the players at the top of Statcast’s FRV leaderboard are by-and-large elite pitch framers, Raleigh and Rogers among them. Fermin, meanwhile, graded out negatively as a framer. This may not matter for Gold Glove purposes. Rawlings uses a combination of manager/coach voting and the SABR Defensive Index to determine Gold Glove winners. Per their selection criteria website:

The SDI combines measures from six (6) different defensive data sources and includes factors that rate the defenders arm strength and accuracy, range and his sure-handedness, along with the number of “excellent” and “poor” fielding plays he makes....For catchers, blocking balls in the dirt and stolen bases/ caught stealing are also included.

Based on this, it is unclear if the SDI weighs pitch framing at all. Managers and coaches may consider it, but it’s possible that pitch framing is irrelevant for statistical purposes. That would be a massive point in favor of Fermin as he excelled at the other defensive aspects of catching.

Showing off a cannon behind the dish, Fermin threw out 17-of-38 attempted base-stealers this season. That's a 44.7% CS rate, easily the highest in baseball among 40 catchers with at least 500 innings caught. The gap between Fermin and second-place Will Smith (33.3%) is bigger than the gap between Smith and 17th-ranked William Contreras (22.6%). Teams were largely dissuaded from even attempting to run on Fermin — opposing teams attempted the fewest stolen bases on a per-inning basis with Fermin behind the plate than any other qualified catcher. Salvador Perez ranked second in that measure, so Royals pitchers deserve some credit, but this is where Statcast’s Catcher Throwing metrics really illuminate Fermin’s talents.

The old adage goes “you steal off the pitcher, not the catcher,” hence the limitations in raw CS% as an evaluative metric. Statcast attempts to isolate the catcher’s contributions independent of the pitcher or the baserunner (currently only available for steals of second base). In 23 attempted steals of second, Fermin gunned down 14 runners, an astonishing 60.9% CS% that only Luis Torrens was even within shouting distance of. Statcast estimated a 26.1% CS% on these plays, meaning Fermin had 8 CS above average on the season. This means that he was regularly throwing out base-stealers on plays that Statcast expects the runner to be safe. For example, check out this play from the September 17 game against Detroit:

Cole Ragans, not especially quick to the plate on this pitch, delivers a low breaking ball. Andy Ibáñez, with his 58th-percentile sprint speed, gets a brilliant jump. Statcast gives this just an 11% chance of being a caught stealing. Fermin unleashes an absolutely perfect throw, with Michael Massey barely needing to move his glove to slap the tag on Ibáñez. The following play was very similar, with an estimated 16% CS (the safe call was overturned upon review):

In addition to throwing, Fermin also excelled at keeping the ball in front of him. Statcast has a Catcher Blocking metric that aims to quantify a catcher’s ability to prevent wild pitches and passed balls. The probability of a pitch getting past the catcher is determined by a cocktail of factors including pitch velocity, location, and pitcher handedness. Statcast estimated that Fermin should have allowed 24 wild pitches/passed balls in 2024. He allowed just 14, which was the third-best actual: expected ratio among American League catchers.

The winner of this Gold Glove will come down to which aspects of catcher defense are most valued by voters and SABR’s formula. If framing is faded or disregarded entirely, Fermin has a very strong case for this award.

Bobby Witt Jr., SS

After being robbed of a Gold Glove last season, Witt is a finalist for the award in 2024. When comparing him to fellow finalists Anthony Volpe and Brayan Rocchio, the discussion largely comes down to your preferred flavor of defensive metrics:

DRS and UZR agree that Rocchio is the guy, while Statcast data prefers Witt and Volpe. This is a tricky one to evaluate. Last season, DRS rated Witt as a negative on defense and UZR considered him about average. Meanwhile, Statcast indicated he was one of the best defenders in baseball and the eye test seemed to back that up. The metrics this season all agree that he was a plus with the glove, but to varying degrees.

I’m not here to argue for the superior defensive metric, but I tend to lean toward Statcast data as it provides the most complete picture of a player’s defensive contributions. That said, I think there is still work to do in terms of how exactly it captures infield defense. We broke down in the previous section the various components of catcher defense. Outfield defense includes such details as route efficiency, jumps, and throwing. While Statcast captures infield defense in terms of how effective a player was based on positioning and the direction they move in, it doesn’t provide much detail in terms of how they created value. I can say that Witt was extremely effective at making plays in the hole, but that doesn’t tell you exactly how he was effective. Every outfield play has a calculated catch probability — no such publicly available metric exists for infielders.

All this is to say I have no idea who will win this award due to the mixed bag of defensive metrics. The eye test tells me that Witt is an exceptional defender. Max shared several of his best plays recently, but here are a few others worth highlighting:

Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo, P

The Royals clearly took PFP very seriously in spring training, with 67% of the top three finishers in the pitcher Gold Glove wearing Royal blue. They will be up against 2020 Gold Glove winner Griffin Canning.

Making a case for a pitcher is no easy task. Fielding opportunities for pitchers are far more limited than any other position and DRS is the only publicly available advanced metric to evaluate them. DRS has Lugo and Canning tied for second in the AL with Michael Wacha at 5, with the three of them behind AL leader Tanner Bibee at 6 (further to the earlier point on PFP, Kansas City’s top four starters as well as two relievers finished in the top 16 in the AL in DRS).

One can glean a few things from old school stats. None of the three finalists made an error, and all three were among 14 qualified AL pitchers to only allow single-digit stolen bases. Lugo had far and away the most assists among pitchers with 29, nine more than Canning and 10 more than Ragans. Lugo was also tied for the lead in double plays started with three, while Ragans had just one and Canning didn’t have any. However, Lugo did not have any pickoffs and Ragans had only one, while Canning was tied for third in the league with three.

Based on the very limited data available, I’d say Lugo is as good a candidate as any for this Gold Glove, while Bibee probably should have been in the top three over Ragans.