How Royce Lewis Has Been an Improvement on Kody Clemens's Defense at First base

The first days of Royce Lewis's transition to first base were ugly. There are sitll times when it's ugly. He's inexperienced on the right side of the infield and in the mental game of that position, which is very different from the other spots on the dirt, and it shows. He's made the wrong play, or taken the wrong first step, more than once. He's learning on the job at that spot, just as Luke Keaschall is in the outfield. 

There are some moments, though, when you can see the real and durable benefit of having a player who still thinks of himself as "a shortstop playing first base." Specifically, as was highlighted when Baseball Savant rolled out new Statcast data this week documenting players' skills receiving throws at first base, Lewis is good at converting outs on throws from his teammates—and significantly better than the player his reemergence at that spot has displaced, Kody Clemens.

According to Statcast, Lewis has already been worth 1 Out Above Average (OAA) as a receiver at first base, where he's had 164 tracked opportunities. Before Lewis moved to first and (mostly) pushed Clemens to second base, the latter had 142 tracked chances as a receiver at first, and was worth -2 OAA on those plays. Let's take a look at how and why.

Clemens was fine on throws that were on target to him. A relatively athletic 6 feet tall and with ample experience around the bag (almost 1,500 professional innings at first base), Clemens has the basic toolkit to be a solid receiver. However, he struggled mightily on throws he had to field on the bounce, throughout the early part of the season. Statcast subdivides such plays into Bounce plays (where the ball skips at least 15 feet before the base) and scoops (where it bounces between 5 and 15 feet from the bag), but Clemens didn't experience much difference. He was worth -1.7 OAA on each type of play.

Most of that lost value came from one correctable but (for whatever reason) enduring error in the way Clemens addressed the ball in those situations. He strongly preferred to work with his glove hand in front of his left leg as he anchored himself at first base, and to pick low throws backhanded.

It's rare that you can put it this bluntly when it comes to how the best baseball players on Earth do their jobs, but this is simply wrong. A first baseman should stay relatively upright when they first reach the base, withholding their stride and lunge as long as possible so they can direct it toward the incoming throw. Most of the time, that allows one to field the ball with the glove in the forehand, fingers-down position. Only if a throw is tracking toward being wide by several feet should you turn your hips and reach for the hop with your thumb down. In the video above, you can see by his forward lean that Clemens committed himself too soon. If you have to play the ball backhanded, it's nice to be forward that way, so your front leg doesn't get in the way of being low enough to field the bounce cleanly, but that's a more difficult play than the throw required him to make. If he'd positioned his body more neutral and strode down through the ball later, with his glove hand freer to move and on the outside of his left leg, he could have picked this fairly easily.

Nor was the above an isolated case. Here's an even more glaring one. Everything about this play, from where Lewis fielded the ball (and thus, the angle of the incoming throw) to the initial trajectory of the ball out of his hand, should have told Clemens to field the ball outside his leg, forehanded. Instead, he whiffed on the bounce because he mistimed the difficult maneuver of snatching it backhanded and turning the glove to secure the catch.

A great many errors and infield singles involve some shared blame, and it's not entirely Clemens's fault that his record of playing bounces and scoops was so dreary. Neither of the throws above were good ones, even though Clemens should have done better with each. Statcast captures some of this, by estimating the expected out rate on all plays involving an infield throw and catch. That's how they assign responsibility and allot OAA in either direction. It also gives us some insight into how easy (or not) teammates made the job for any given first baseman. Overall, in his opportunities, Lewis has an expected out rate of 95.3%, 1.0 percentage points above the league average. Clemens's mark is 91.9%. Teamnmates (including and especially Lewis) made Clemens's job harder than it is for most first basemen; teammates (including Clemens) have made Lewis's job much easier.

Not all of that is even captured by the numbers. There's a rhythm to infield playmaking, and shaky defense wrecks it. Sometimes, Clemens had to navigate not only an off-target throw, but one that arrived much later than he'd expected when he first read the ball off the bat and put his head down to break toward the base. Here's Lewis falling down on a ball he fielded cleanly, making a tough short-hop throw even harder to handle because the timing of the play was so disrupted.

There was more than one play similar to the above for Clemens early in the year, with both Lewis and Luke Keaschall often botching their first touch and having to rush a throw because they'd already half-ruined the play. Statcast can't really account for the way a first baseman's perception is thrown off when a teammate unexpectedly bobbles, drops or hitches en route to making a throw, but those things matter. It also can't capture the added deception of Lewis's fairly hideous overhand throwing motion from third base, which contributed to more than one misstep or missed catch by Clemens.

However, that strangely unaddressed tendency to backhand balls that shouldn't have been fielded that way was the main driver of Clemens's failures to field throws well enough at first. Here's one where Lewis makes an imperfect but very long throw, and is essentially on target. Clemens just has to field the ball on his forehand side. He's so uncomfortable doing that that he falls over trying.

Again, that's supposed to be—is, really—the easier way to field that ball. Clemens is so habituated to the opposite that he couldn't handle it. He made life too hard on himself on low throws, and the way the team filled out its lineup card for most of the early season, there were too many low throws to make that a tenable state of affairs.

For all his throwing trouble and the awkwardness of his playmaking at the hot corner, though, Lewis is a natural as a picker at first base. Here he is not only correctly choosing a time to backhand a ball, but making the play better. He doesn't lunge as early, and when he picks the short hop, he does so with his body moving fluidly through the ball.

This is a great instruction in one of the subtleties of athleticism, too. Lewis and Clemens are both 6 feet tall, as documented by the league for the purposes of applying an ABS strike zone to each. They're the same height, in the books and in real life, but Lewis's arms and legs are longer. That shows up in a big way when you see him make plays like the above, in contrast with the way Clemens has to attempt the same plays. Some of it is better mechanics, and perhaps better instincts or better coaching. Some of it is proportions working better for one player than for another of the same height.

Again, though, Lewis does things the right way at first base, too, in a way Clemens didn't. Here he is making easy work of a throw that skipped to him, by simply playing it on the correct side of his body.

Here's an even better play, on which his instinct to stay back a bit longer and then make a fast, decisive move toward the ball (on the forehand side) was the finishing touch on a great play. (The runner was initially ruled safe, but a replay overturned that call.)

There have been some miscues, but Lewis has been more than solid in this regard; he's been great. In his first week at first after being recalled in June, there was one play where he should have slid along the edge of the bag better and caught a high Keaschall throw while holding the base, for an out. On July 1, he simply clanked a routine throw for an error in Houston. Take away those two plays, though, and he rates even better than the 1 OAA of net value mentioned above. He's been every bit as good as a first-base receiver as Clemens was bad.

For the Twins, this is a major development, and it bears watching down the stretch. Lewis is batting .274/.336/.481 since his return from the minors on June 6. That's production you'll happily take from an everyday first baseman. He's also a plus in this previously nebulous area of defense, and if he shows better range and feel for situational play as he racks up reps at the spot, he becomes a very valuable player again, in a somewhat unexpected way. 

Injuries defined Lewis's early career. He himself still brings them up frequently. For the bulk of the last two and a half seasons, though, he's been healthy. There were long stretches in there where it looked like he might have no viable defensive home; there were long stretches where it looked like he might not hit enough to remain a regular. Now, however, he's looking a lot like a good (if not quite star-caliber) first baseman, with some newfound durability and value on both sides of the ball. He seems to have cleared some important mental hurdles. His body is holding up better than it did before. 

When the team moved Lewis to first at the start of the summer, they did so (basically) as a Hail Mary. They needed to reinvigorate their lineup, and he was smashing Triple-A pitching. They needed someone to take over first base, allowing Clemens to spend his time at positions he plays better, but they didn't like what they saw defensively from either Josh Bell or Victor Caratini. Putting Lewis at that position was a last-ditch attempt to get anything good out of a player who was becoming a plausible trade candidate or a non-tender candidate come fall. As it turns out, that prayer might have been answered. Lewis might just have a medium-term home in the Twins' plans, and they might end up very glad that circumstances conspired to put their most fragile could-be slugger at a position he wouldn't have volunteered to play—but which suits his body and his skill set quite well.