The key passage from Miles Wray’s article:
But I’d like to propose that, at least when it comes to fielding, Kang and the Pirates are a wonderful fit for one another, defensively speaking.
I say this because Neal Huntington and his analytics team have been pulling off a wonderful trick for the last three years: in each season, the Pirates have put together an above-average defensive BABIP despite having a roster full of mostly-below-average defensive players.
I’d recommend checking the whole thing out because there are a lot of interesting thoughts, but yeah, I think that that’s the value of the Pirates’ shifting: hiding sub-par defenders that can hit (Neil Walker, Pedro Alvarez in 2012 and 2013) inside of a functional defense that’s good at turning balls in play into outs. In that regard, the Pirates taking a risk on Kang makes a ton of sense, because they might be able to hide him at a premium defensive position better than other teams.
