Pablo Sandoval's Defense

The Pablo Sandoval narrative is pretty basic and clear. In 2010, he was out of shape, and his defense accordingly suffered, as he exhibited mediocre range. In 2011, with improved physical condition, Sandoval has played superb defense at third. For obvious reasons, it's difficult to find videos highlighting Sandoval's poor range at third in 2010, but after a little digging and searching, I think I've found one.

The play itself is pretty simple, but I think it's a microcosm of Sandoval's 2010 defense at large: he struggled to get to groundballs within his vicinity. There's no question in my mind that 2011's Sandoval would have made this play. 

Of course, on the flip side, it's much easier to find clips of Sandoval's excellent defense this year, like the two GIFs embedded below: 

What's cool is the defensive metrics are all consistent with this narrative.

Below is a chart detailing how various defensive metrics have graded Sandoval over the past three seasons. 

Year	UZR	DRS	FRAA	FSR	TZ
2009	-3.6	-8	-3.1	0	-3
2010	1.2	2	-6.0	-4	-4
2011	8.8	7	4.8	N/A	9

Now, obviously one should not put much trust in this data, as the sample size is quite small (as Mike Rogers of Bless You Boys once said -- and I think it can pretty much apply to all defensive metrics -- one year of UZR data is on par with about 50-55 games worth of offense, and of course, what we have here is half a year of data for 2011). And defensive metrics have some significant limitations in year-to-year analysis.

Nevertheless, the improvement across the board in these defensive metrics looks pretty large, and it will be interesting to see if it stays that way. There's probably more to it than just weight loss, but in the end, one thing is obvious: Pablo's looked a lot better at the hot corner this year, and along with Brandon Crawford, has solidified the Giants' defense on the left side of the infield.