Phillies To Use Pickleball-Inspired Technique To Improve Their Poor Defence

You keep hearing that the Phillies don’t have a good defense, and for the most part the last two years, that has been unquestionably accurate. According to Statcast’s Outs Above Average, Philadelphia placed 29th in the Majors in 2022. Stories of the team’s success during its run to the World Series were common, despite its defensive shortcomings. The Phillies finished 16th in OAA this year, which is “better!” but “still not that great!”

Phillies To Use Pickleball-Inspired Technique To Improve Their Poor Defence

When everything was said and done, the Phillies were the fourth-poorest fielding team—not counting catchers—during those two seasons. Then, discard everything right away because it is irrelevant at this time. All that matters is the collection of players they have at this exact moment in time and how they’re deployed — and Philadelphia’s current group of fielders isn’t bad. They might actually be good.

Underfield coach Paco Figueroa thinks so, too, about this modified pickleball variation, dubbed Pacoball after The Athletic’s Matt Gelb.

“It helps with a lot of things,” Figueroa says. “Moving different directions, agility, you gotta drop to get the ball, go in to hit it. I envision our three outfielders [playing across from another three outfielders, and doing] a lot of communicating—‘I got it, I got it’—and you’re switching positions.” He smiles. “And a lot of it is competitiveness. The more you can compete, the better it is.”

This spring when he arrived at camp, he gave the grounds staff instructions to choose a spot where they could get out of the way and trample the grass before demarcating four thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot squares. After playing a few practice games with the staff (catcher Garrett Stubbs describes it as “a combination of foursquare, squash, and pickleball”), he gave his outfielders a lesson in the modified game.

“I’ve never played pickleball,” says corner outfielder Jake Cave. “And I was actually making fun of it a couple days ago, saying it was, like, an old person game, because my dad lives in The Villages [which bills itself as ‘Florida’s friendliest active adult 55+ retirement community’] and that’s the most popular game there. I was making fun of it. But then I went out there.” Cave says he is going to call his father and apologize.

The Phillies’ defense wasn’t very strong last season, and it didn’t get much better this year either. The Phillies’ defense in April was ordinary (-3 OAA, 20th in the Majors), and in May it was significantly worse (-5 OAA, 26th), which was coinciding with Bryce Harper’s return to DH duties, which forced Kyle Schwarber to play more often in the outfield. Not that this was a new circumstance; the Phillies were the third-worst fielding club in MLB from 2016 to 22.

However, it improved later in the season (the September Phillies finished 10th in the Majors with 4 OAA), and while October’s advanced metrics aren’t quite as useful as they were in September, there are still some useful figures.

“What I like to teach is, as you see defenders, the best ones are aggressive through the ball,” he says. “You can visualize it.”

Well, whatever technique he is using is working pretty well for Phillies!

 

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