Phillies actually addressed the Hoskins subject here. Obviously he's getting tendered, for starters.
Some crude analysis here by Hayes.
_Hoskins, meanwhile, hit 30 homers in the regular season and six more in the playoffs, but he led the majors with 12 errors at first base and was second worst with a .990 fielding percentage...._
His bosses don’t see his bad hands as a big problem, and they don’t plan on addressing it with any urgency.
“Won’t work on his defense this winter,” Dombrowski said. “He actually improved, metrically, compared to how he has been in the past.”
Hoskins might be better — more on that later — but man, he just looks bad.
Curiously, his dWAR — his defensive Wins Above Replacement — of minus-0.3 ranked fourth among the 18 qualifying first basemen. Yes, fourth.
That was below NL Gold Glove winner Christian Walker of the Diamondbacks, but it was higher than Gold Glove finalist Paul Goldschmidt, who won his fourth Gold Glove just last year.
General manager Sam Fuld, an analytics expert, said the Phillies don’t rely on publicly available metrics such as dWAR, which seeks to quantify a player’s comparative value as a defender, but they use analytics that made Dombrowski say what he said.
“We have our own way of evaluating defense — not that we are completely shut off from public metrics,” Fuld said. He also noted that first base is where bumblers go to hide. “We see, in Rhys, somebody who drops a ball every now and then. The reality is, most first basemen do that. Sometimes the blunders get spotlit a little bit brighter than the good plays.”
Hoskins was the worst first baseman on the planet in 2018, his first full season in the majors, with a minus-3.6 dWAR. He improved 200% the next season, to a less-than-ideal minus-1.2. He hovered there through 2021.
Then, in 2022, he erupted into a paragon of defensive competence, with that minus-0.3 dWAR, a 400% improvement.
All of which either charts Hoskins’ improvement with the glove or completely invalidates dWAR.
Of course Hayes makes a huge blunder here regarding 2018.
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