MLB's leader in errors is still a top defender. Here's how

Elly De La Cruz leads the Major Leagues in errors. At the same time, the Reds shortstop is also putting together a season that should have him in the conversation for National League Most Valuable Player in a few months, based in some part on his improving defense, which helped him enter the All-Star break ranking second in the National League in WAR, behind only Shohei Ohtani -- who, as a DH, plays a position that has never won the award before in either league.

Sound counterintuitive? Evaluating defense often can be.

Let’s start with this: Errors aren’t a good thing, yet they also don’t really tell you much about who is a good fielder or not. Those are our words, but Cincinnati manager David Bell essentially echoed them when asked about it in the final week before the All-Star break.

“Errors don’t tell the whole story,” said Bell. “If you’re not making some errors as a defender, I don’t think you’re playing defense the right way.”

Fair enough. After all, Javier Báez, who before a 2024 step back was regarded as one of the most magical defenders in the game, annually rates near the top of the error leaderboard. Conversely, Nick Castellanos, who rates at or near the bottom of every advanced defensive metric among outfielders, made it through the entire 2022 and 2023 seasons without being charged with a single error. You won't get charged with an error if you're not close enough to make the play, as Alex Verdugo recently showed us in Baltimore.

“You expose yourself to errors when you’re not afraid to make errors,” continued Bell, the Reds manager. “There’s ways to avoid errors. There are defenders out there who will do that. They’ll put themselves in a position where they don’t get charged with an error if they don’t make a play on it. Errors don’t tell the story. I know it’s a very subjective part of the game and it’s one factor in evaluating a player. But there’s much more to it. He’s making the plays.”

It seems safe to say that De La Cruz is not afraid to make errors. And yet: a Major League-leading 17 errors, to go with +8 Outs Above Average, tied for 10th-best among infielders in the first half? It’s a difficult combination to wrap your head around. So how is that even possible? Let’s find out. (All stats below are as of the All-Star break.)

The king of the great plays

If you’re giving back that much value on one end, you’d better be making up for it on the other end.

Every single play tracked by Statcast is given an out probability, based primarily on distance and time, as well as runner speed on certain plays. So for example, in May, when De La Cruz ranged into the grass to collect a Chris Taylor grounder and complete the play, it was an opportunity that had a 40% chance of being an out -- which is to say, more than half the time, it isn’t. Taylor, even at 33, still possesses above-average speed, requiring De La Cruz to get rid of the ball quickly.

Or the one back in April in Texas, the one that impressed Bell so much that he said “that had to be one of the best plays of the year in all of baseball ... and I don’t know that it’s on the radar for that because he made it look so easy,” afterward? Graded as 50/50, which is a lot more impressive in a metric like this than it sounds.

You get the idea. Every play gets a number. Sometimes that number is under 5%, or essentially unmakeable. Sometimes that number is 99%, or incredibly easy. If we draw a line at 70%, and say anything under that line is “a hard play,” then there’s no one -- no one! -- better at converting those difficult plays into outs.

Most Outs Above Average on “hard plays”

• +14 Elly De La Cruz ←
• +11 Bobby Witt Jr.
• +9 Jacob Young
• +8 Francisco Lindor
• +7 Michael Siani
• +7 Ketel Marte

Sometimes, those plays look absolutely spectacular, like this one, where De La Cruz had to range 112 feet into the outfield at an elite 31.4 ft/sec sprint speed to pull down a pop-up. It rates as his most difficult play of the year.

Sometimes they don’t, like in June, when he threw out Pittsburgh’s Nick Gonzales on a play that was graded as having merely a 30% chance of being converted.

If that sounds too low -- that it doesn’t look that hard -- then remember that Gonzalez is one of the 30 fastest players in the Majors, which is taken into account here. It’s a lot harder to throw out a player with plus speed than, say, a slow-footed backup catcher. (For what it’s worth: Gonzales was also flying, posting his second-best home-to-first of the season on this one.)

Also in June, he had to rush to get a slow roller and still throw out Christian Yelich, who retains his elite speed. That was a ‘hard’ one, too.

You get the idea, and the numbers probably match the eye test here. We know De La Cruz has truly elite speed; among players who have spent the entire season in the bigs, he’s second only to Bobby Witt Jr. We know De La Cruz has a top-shelf throwing arm; his 91.5 mph average is the fourth best among infielders, and he’s been clocked as high as 99. It shouldn’t be surprising that an electric player with such physical gifts can get to plays that almost no one else can.

But if defense was just about the hard ones, then De La Cruz would be the most outstanding fielder in the game. If we’ve learned anything about fielding through Statcast, it’s that a lot of times, simply making all the easy plays is as or more important than topping the daily highlight reels -- which is mostly how the always-steady-but-not-always-spectacular Dansby Swanson was graded as 2023’s most effective defender.

So, as you might expect, there’s a flip side here. What about the "easy" plays, the ones that are graded with a 70%-99% likelihood of being made? As you might guess, De La Cruz doesn’t make the most miscues on the easy plays, but he’s not far off, either. It’s not a list you want to be on.

Fewest Outs Above Average on “easy plays”

• -10 Christopher Morel
• -9 CJ Abrams
• -7 Ceddanne Rafaela
• -7 Blake Alexander
• -6 Elly De La Cruz ←
• -6 Luis Arraez
• -6 Enmanuel Valdez
• -6 Mookie Betts

This, here, is the difference. If you go back to the first list, the one about doing the best on "hard" plays, the one that De La Cruz topped, then everyone else on that list -- Witt, Young, Lindor, Siani, and Marte -- was either average or good on the ‘easy’ plays, too. This probably also matches the eye test, for De La Cruz; after all, doesn’t make 17 errors by accident.

So, we went and watched all 17 of those errors. About one-third, in our estimation, were no-questions-asked botches, like this grounder that went right through him, or this somewhat ill-advised glove flip that pulled the second baseman off the bag.

But a common theme emerged, and it’s mostly about the accuracy that comes with that rocket of a right arm. Sometimes it’s just your garden variety wide throw, like this one in San Francisco or this one against the Phillies. Sometimes it’s a fantastic diving stop where it was unlikely he’d get the out at first anyway, but a wild throw let the runner take second as well; sometimes it’s a poor throw attempting to complete a 3-6-3 double play, or trying to get a runner at home from short center field -- where simultaneously the catcher might have saved the error, yet also maybe the throw shouldn’t have been made in the first place, as it allowed the batter to take second.

It is, it seems, a lot about that arm allowing him to try to attempt plays that no one else even would -- sometimes inadvisably.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that they haven’t put work into trying to improve that issue.

“I think [adjusting his arm slot has] helped his accuracy a lot,” Bell said back in April. “That’s one difference from last year ... it’s just been better and easier for him to make plays because of the shortened arm slot.”

There’s some evidence in the numbers, too. De La Cruz’s average throwing speed from shortstop has dropped from last year’s 95.1 mph to this year’s 91.3 mph. The top 13 tracked throws of his career, in terms of mph, all came in 2023. Presumably none of this is because he physically can’t throw that hard, but rather that he’s trying to exchange just a little bit of power for accuracy, even if it hasn’t quite fully translated yet.

“The errors -- I think as he goes, there might be improvement in that area,” said Bell earlier this month.

“We look at what he does on a daily basis and the work he puts in, the consistency with which he’s making his throws and how clean he is with how he’s receiving the ball and catching the ball, his footwork. I think he’s improved, really, in every area,” the manager continued. “His positioning is the best as far as where we want our players to play. He’s always in the perfect spot. He’s doing everything that we want him to do.”

The errors can’t be talked away. They’re real, and they happened, and they need to be tightened up. But when you’re wondering why a fielder who leads the sport in errors also rates well in one of the leading defensive metrics, now you know. No one is making the spectacular plays like De La Cruz is. Exactly, we think, as you’d expect.

MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon contributed to the reporting of this article.