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Ranger Suarez Reminding Everyone that He’s One of the Best Fielding Pitchers in Baseball
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This one got me off the couch on Monday night:
Otto Kemp should have fielded that, but we ended up with a highlight-reel play as the end result, so we’ll take it.
There’s this prevailing narrative that Ranger Suarez is one of the best fielding pitchers in baseball. It’s mostly true, supported by the optics, i.e. how effortless he makes these plays look, though his numbers are just slightly down in 2025.
Here are the career numbers over eight MLB seasons:
What are we looking at here? I will explain.
“TC” is total chances and “PO” is put outs. So he’s played 185 career games and has 51 putouts on 189 chances. On 134 occasions, he’s gotten the assist on the out, i.e. throwing to first base or whatever. Where the data starts to pop is the error number of four, so he’s committed just four errors in 189 put out chances, which is about a 2% rate. He’s allowed 23 stolen bases in his career and 14 runners have been caught stealing. Pickoffs isn’t necessarily a fielding stat, but he has four of those in his career.
Further to the right, you see his career fielding percentage is .979. RF/G is “range factor per game,” so the number of assists and putouts per game played. His career number comes out to a flat one. But if you calculate the number per nine innings, it goes up to 2.21.
For context, Cristopher Sanchez and Taijuan Walker have committed two errors on 63 fielding chances this season. Suarez and Luzardo have committed four on 58 chances, and Zack Wheeler one error on 20 chances. Aaron Nola has 0 on 12. So you add it up and it’s an error on 4.5% percent of fielding chances. As a team, lumping the starters and relievers together, it’s a .955 fielding percentage and 0.34 range factor. That’s 15th and 7th for the Phils pitching staff, respectively.
Generally good stuff all around.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com