Kinger95 wrote:Been listening to the games on the radio so it’s hard to visualize bo’s good plays when the errors stand out so much more and maybe he has had some terrific defensive gems but I had to look up his defense on fangraphs to see where they rank him defensively. 14th is pretty much as close as you can get to middle of the pack. Just wondering if anyone else thinks he’s more valuable to the team at 2nd if the bad throws and errors continue
It depends on who is replacing him. There's a general belief here that Espinal is a much superior shortstop, and that might be true. We also basically have no evidence to work from; Espinal has very little history of actually playing shortstop in high-level competition. He has played 206 innings there as a major leaguer (so, like, 20ish games), and he played it sparingly in the upper minors as well (about 10 games worth of SS in AAA, about 30 games worth in AA).
Prior to this season, while basically all of the defensive metrics disagreed on individual seasons, Bichette rated anywhere from slightly below average (OAA and UZR) to slightly above average (DRS) as a shortstop. This year, he grades out badly.
The question then becomes: which is more likely, that Espinal is a well above-average defensive shortstop, or that Bichette rebounds to his 2019-2021 defensive performance? If we had enough data to suggest that Espi was a really good defensive SS, you'd probably lean that way. But that also means playing Espinal full-time, and Espinal has an OPS of .574 over the past two and a half months, so shoehorning him into the lineup nightly only to find out that he's not really all that good at SS would be a major net negative.