Again, that really depends on just how much you value defense. I just don't think a definitive statement can be made that either Heyward has been more valueable up to this point and that he will be more valuable moving forward. To just quote WAR and try to make it an open and shut case I think it inappropriate.
Here is an interesting write-up about defense and WAR, this one talks about Simmons:
This is from Joe Peta
Adding to that annual tradition, let’s take a look at Adrelton Simmons, the Atlanta Braves 24 year-old Gold Glove winning shortstop. On the strength of his first full season in 2013, in which he finished 14th in MVP voting, the Braves bestowed a 7-year, $58 million contract on Simmons this offseason. That’s a lot of money for a player who hit .248/.296/.396. Shortstops across the majors hit .254/.308/.367 making Simmons essentially a player with league-average offensive talent at the weakest-hitting position on the field. Because it’s average production, there are a lot of shortstops around the league (Zack Cozart, Erik Aybar, and Asdrubal Cabrera are good examples) with similar production and they aren’t getting $58mm guaranteed contracts.
That’s because, of course, Simmons has been called the greatest fielding shortstop to enter the majors in a generation. Unlike the days of Larry Bowa, Dave Concepcion, and Ozzie Smith, we don’t have to guess at the value of defense. These days, defense is a component of WAR, and a look at Baseball-Reference shows Simmons as a 6.8 WAR player in 2013. 6.8 is a huge amount of WAR – enough to rank Simmons in the top 8 of all everyday players. (Think about that. The other 7 are the likes of Trout, Cabrera, Cano, etc.) In theory, league-average hitters at any position are 2.0 WAR players and sure enough, bWAR allocates 2.1 to Simmons for offensive contributions. That means 4.7 of his WAR comes from being an above-average defender.
Let’s break that down further. Using rules of thumb here, 10 runs = a win and 2 hits = a run. That means Simmons must have prevented 94 (4.7 * 10 * 2) more hits than the average shortstop. But that is certainly too low a number because while two hits equals a run across all of baseball, all hits are not created equal. While outfielders can prevent home runs, first basemen triples, and third basemen doubles with slick fielding, shortstops can only prevent singles. So it’s certainly safe to conservatively say that at least 100 singles would need to be prevented to save 47 runs which would equate to 4.7 wins. (In the formula above, we’re changing the “2 hits per run” to “2.17 singles per run”, which we’ll come back to later.)
Across all of baseball last year, shortstops recorded 13,772 assists for an average of 459 per team. While fielding ground balls is a shortstop’s primary weapon to rob batters of a base hit, he also can snare line drives or range into the outfield to catch pop ups. Shortstops did that a total of 3,219 times last year, or 107 times per team, on average. Therefore, the average shortstop prevented 566 batted balls (459 grounders plus 107 fly balls) from turning into singles. (Note that the putout total excludes putouts recorded on force outs – another fielder prevented the batted ball from reaching the outfield.)
By the calculation above, Simmons would need to have a combination of 666 assists and batted ball putouts to justify a 4.7 addition to his WAR. Well, Simmons was the best in the majors last year per this calculation, so his reputation is justified. But his total assists plus batted ball putouts only totaled 616. That’s 50 short of what’s needed. Converting that back to WAR – 50 singles at 2.17 singles per run equals 23 runs, divided by 10 runs a win leaves a substantial shortfall of 2.3 WAR. WAR is somewhat like the Richter scale in that it’s not linear. There are not half as many 8 WAR players as 4 WAR players or one-quarter as many as 2 WAR players. Calling a 4.5 WAR player a 6.8 WAR player is a massive overstatement. It’s akin to calling a bottom-tier All-Star a border-line MVP candidate.
There are a couple of subtle factors that suggest the overstatement is even larger. Run a regression and you’ll find the largest factors contributing to balls hit to the left side of the infield are the handedness of the batter and the groundball tendencies of the pitcher. The Braves faced right-handed batters 60% of the time last year compared to the MLB average of 56% and the Braves staff threw the sixth highest percentage of groundballs in the majors. Those numbers, which suggest Simmons would collect more assists and putouts than the average shortstop, even if he were merely average, are mitigated somewhat by the fact that, thanks to the Braves high-strikeout staff (and other competent fielders) 1.7% less balls (74 total) were hit into the field of play against the Braves than the average team. Still, I suspect those three factors together would ding Simmons versus the average just a bit more.
This exercise isn’t to suggest Andrelton Simmons isn’t a marvelous shortstop. He most certainly is, the best in baseball, in fact. But the value that is being ascribed to his fielding is out of control thanks to the ‘eye test’ that is essentially used to calculate his worth. It’s extremely unlikely that he’s worth anywhere even close to a 7 WAR player.
One final thought: In the NL West essay I took some heavy flak for calling Paul Goldschmidt, at this point of his career, a poor-man’s Ryan Howard. I vehemently stand by that until he hits 58 home runs this year, and two hundred over the next four. Well, if that got you upset (and you know who you are) try this one on: As great as Andrelton Simmons is in the field, he’s a homeless man’s Ozzie Smith. Consider this: Last year, at age 24, Simmons collected a league-leading 499 assists, 40 more than the average team. In his age-25 season, Smith had 621 assists, 90 more than the average team. That’s one tough comp Simmons has this year if he really wants to be considered in Smith’s league defensively.
