Are the Padres’ Outfielders Hitting Enough?

Less than two months into the season, the Padres are hovering around .500, and it’s unclear whether their blockbuster offseason roster makeover will pay off as the season unfolds. However, one result of all of the team’s moves has become very clear over six weeks; the Padres’ outfield defense is bad.

It was apparent from the outset that the Padres were trading defense for offense, as we detailed in a Stat of the Week from December. The lack of defense part has come true. Their outfielders have cost the team 15 runs, which is tied for the worst total in baseball. The question then is whether the offensive upgrade has been enough to counterbalance it.

To compare the offense-first Padres from 2015 to the defense-first team from 2014, we can use Total Runs. Total Runs measures offensive, defensive, baserunning, and pitching success on a scale of runs so you can make an apples-to-apples comparison between players. Total Runs also has a positional adjustment to account for the relative difficulty of handling each position, but since we’re looking at outfielders vs. outfielders, those differences are negligible.

Looking first at 2015, Justin Upton has been the most productive Padres’ outfielder both offensively and defensively. His 28 Runs Created are tied for the 13th most in baseball—with Mike Trout among others—and he has been only slightly below average defensively in left field. Wil Myers and Matt Kemp have been less productive offensively, and Myers, especially, has cost the team defensively—although it may not entirely be fair to blame Myers for performing poorly in center field since neither he nor Kemp is a great fit for the position.

The primary Padres’ outfielders from 2014 combined to save the team 17 runs defensively, but Will Venable, Chris Denorfia, and Cameron Maybin all performed poorly with their bats. So far in 2015, Upton has already provided more Runs Created than Maybin did in 95 games last season, and he’s tied with Denorfia, who played in 121 games last season split between the Padres and the Mariners.

Powered by Upton, the 2015 Padres’ outfield has been doing enough offensively to make up for that defensive gap and then some. As a unit, they have produced 0.63 Total Runs per game played compared to just 0.47 from last year’s outfielders. Of course, the Padres transition from its 2014 outfielders to its 2015 ones isn’t that straight forward. Other players were given up in those deals, and they took on significant salary. Nevertheless, one wonders if the team might have been better off forgoing one of Kemp or Myers to maintain more of a balance between offense and defense in their outfield.