Since I’ve twice written above defense in the last week, it’s high time I actually explain these defensive stats. Luckily, this is quite easy to explain and understand. There are two primary defensive metrics that people use. Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), which are based on people watching video of every play and computer algorithms.

You can learn exactly how each is calculate here, DRS and UZR. But you don’t need to know how to calculate them in order to understand what they mean. It’s important to learn about these because Fielding % is problematic stat because it doesn’t factor in a player’s range, so you can have a good fielding percentage if you don’t make errors because you never get to difficult balls. We need numbers that measure how good players are at preventing runs and avoiding errors isn’t the only way to do that.

The numbers are scaled to position, so league average at every position is zero and positive numbers are good and negative numbers are bad.

For example a player with a +5 DRS or +5 UZR is five runs better than league average at their position. 10 runs is equal to 1 Win Above Replacement (WAR). These are counting stats, so you accumulate them as the season goes on, although I believe they are only updated weekly on the more popular statistics websites.

You can use either DRS or UZR depending on your preference, but Baseball Reference uses DRS in their WAR and Fangraphs uses UZR in theirs. It’s a preference thing. I always use Fangraphs WAR on this site, but I interchange the defensive stats on occasion because I don’t really have a favorite. If there is no label on this site, it is UZR.

Additionally, you might see UZR/150, which is simply UZR scaled into a full season of games as if you played at your current pace for a whole season.

As a rule of thumb, 0 is average, -5/+5 is above or below average, -10/+10 is poor or great, -15/+15 is awful or elite. It is also important to know that these statistics take a while to become predictive, so small samples can cause problems with defensive numbers but they generally all a good description of what has happened, even if it doesn’t predict what will happen next.