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J.P. Crawford isn’t playing up to his defensive potential this season—yet

Bad Zach (Zach Gottschalk) has a theory that Fernando Tatís Jr. didn’t want to wait for his wrist to heal before returning to baseball and so has inhabited J.P. Crawford’s body. With it has come vastly improved offense but also some defensive plays more disappointing than season 2 of Russian Doll.

Defensive statistics are so unreliable in small samples that I sometimes wish outlets wouldn’t even publish them. But it’s hard to ignore that zaffer-colored slider on Crawford’s Savant page telling us that he’s in the first percentile in Outs Above Average, lowest in baseball.