It’s been a running thing internally here in trying to understand why Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. wasn’t doing better in Defensive Runs Saved the last couple seasons. 

Witt had 2 Runs Saved in 2024 and 3 Runs Saved in 2025. He won a Gold Glove both years and was crushing it in other defensive metrics. Yet he wasn’t near the top of our leaderboard. Our out probability calculations had Witt with below-average numbers on balls hit to his left in particular, and he wasn’t making enough other plays to make up for that.

However, we now have an answer as to what it would take for him to ascend to high heights. Witt ranks second among shortstops with 7 Defensive Runs Saved this season.

Here’s what it took to get him there: perfection. Or something really close to it.

Witt has played the second-most innings of any shortstop this season. Tuesday he made his first error of the year (a bad throw). He also has only one “Defensive Misplay.”

Defensive Misplays are a supplemental scoring system. It’s based on human judgement from our Data Scout crew within a series of tightly-defined rules and examples. Essentially it’s a check against an official scorer and a more detailed version of scoring. 

The basic definition of a Defensive Misplay is that it’s anything a fielder does that has a negative consequence, which can mean not just the loss of an out but also the loss of an opportunity to get an out. This could be anything from a player slipping and falling to a player getting a bad jump to a player failing to complete a makable double play.

This is Witt’s only Defensive Misplay of 2026.

Witt has 2 Misplays & Errors in 2026. He’s had 37, 35, 31, and 33 in his first four MLB seasons. There’s not really such a thing as “on pace for” when it comes to defense, but it’s fair to say that Witt has a good chance to finish with a total below 30 this season.

Also relevant to Witt’s Runs Saved: he has one of the best highlight reels of any player this year, with plays of all different types.

I went looking for other possibilities of plays on which we could have given him a Misplay. If we really wanted to reach, we could maybe give him a Misplay here. 

Per our associate director of baseball operations, Evan Butler,Witt didn’t get a Defensive Misplay.

“That would be punishing him for even getting to a ball that not everyone would necessarily get to,” Evan said.

It should be noted that Witt does lose a small amount of DRS value for that ball not being turned into an out anyways, because balls hit to that spot at that speed are turned into outs by the shortstop 27 percent of the time. Our out probabilities are not connected to our Good Fielding Play/Defensive Misplay system. We actually rewarded Witt with a “Keeps Ball on Infield” Good Fielding Play because his reaching the ball and keeping in front of him kept the run from scoring, which neutralizes some of the value lost for not making the play.

I watched a collection of all of the other balls that Witt lost Defensive Runs Saved value for. There wasn’t anything else among those that would fall under the definition of “his fault.” Most of them were balls that he couldn’t reach or just missed.

Here are the top 20 shortstops in innings played this season and the number of Defensive Misplays & Errors they have. 

Shortstops With Most Innings Played in 2026

Those 20 players (including Witt) have an average of 8.7 Misplays & Errors. To find a shortstop with fewer Misplays & Errors than Witt, you have to go all the way down to the 30th-ranked shortstop in innings. Carlos Correa has 0 Misplays & Errors, but he’s played only 180 innings, half as many as Witt.

Sometimes we find that public perception of a player’s defense has to catch up with his Defensive Runs Saved. In this case, at least for 42 games, it’s the other way around. Runs Saved has caught up with Witt’s public perception.