Will the 2023 KBO League season be a year that goes against the baseball maxim?

If you are a baseball fan, you can immediately recall one or two ‘contests’ in which a fierce match between the cheering team was lost due to a single ridiculous mistake. The impact of a single mistake made at a critical moment on the pitcher’s mentality and team morale is enormous.

Therefore, reducing mistakes is considered the first step to becoming a strong team. In the same context, a team is considered a strong team if it makes few mistakes and has a solid defense in and out of the field. Looking back at the past KBO leagues, although there are exceptions every year, the teams that advance to the fall baseball league are usually ranked high in the least number of errors.

But this year is different. As of the 3rd, Hanwha (76) ranked first in the fewest mistakes in 2023, followed by Lotte (79) and Samsung (80). Even if you sort them in order of highest defense percentage, they are Hanwha, Samsung, and Lotte.

Among these, none of the teams are likely to play fall baseball this year. The difference between 7th place Lotte (51 wins, 59 losses) and 5th place NC Dinos (57 wins, 51 losses), with 34 games left in the regular season, is a whopping 7 games. Samsung (49 wins, 64 losses) is 3 and a half games behind Lotte, and Hanwha (44 wins, 61 losses) is 4 and a half games behind.

The 2023 KBO League LG Twins and Doosan Bears game was held at Jamsil Stadium on the 31st. LG Park Hae-min. Jamsil = Reporter Park Jae-man pjm@sportschosun.com/2023.08.31/
The ranking of the most mistakes is bound to make you tilt your head. The leader with the most errors is none other than the leading LG Twins. This is followed by NC, Kiwoom, and KT. KT is considered the only competitor to the powerful LG this year. NC is also a team competing with KIA and Doosan for fall baseball.스포츠토토

Mistakes are inherently more common in the infield than in the outfield. By borrowing the power of statistics, you can get a glimpse of the quality of defense that cannot be measured by the number of errors, fielding percentage, or impression alone. A representative example is RAA (Defensive Runs Contribution to Average) from the baseball statistics website Stats. It is an indicator that evaluates the position of the batted ball and defense, the direction of the batted ball based on the front of the defense, and the quality of the batted ball as indicators. Although it is not perfect, you can obtain a leaderboard that is more similar to the real thing.

Lotte is evaluated as a team that makes few mistakes, but has a noticeably narrow defensive range. This impression is proven by explicit numbers through RAA. Lotte’s RAA figure is a whopping -34.40, putting it in last place among the 10 teams. The outfield (10th, -31.97) is worse than the infield (8th, -7.67), especially center field (-14.25) and left field (-11.26). Kiwoom (-11.53) in 9th place and Samsung (-6.07) in 8th place follow.

Even in terms of RAA, Hanwha (22.70) is ranked overwhelmingly first. The conclusion is that although the team’s capabilities are lacking, their defensive ability stands out. Lee Do-yoon (9.24) in the infield and Jin-young Lee (8.08) in the outfield are ranked first overall. The reason Hanwha is at the bottom of the rankings is not because of defense.

On the other hand, LG and NC’s defense, which had the disgrace of being ranked 1st and 2nd in making the most errors, is now in a more familiar position as 3rd (5.07) and 2nd (13.00) overall, respectively, through RAA.