Today's Lineups DIAMONDBACKS PADRES David Peralta - LF Travis Jankowski - RF Ketel Marte - 2B Manuel Margot - CF Paul Goldschmidt - 1B Wil Myers - LF A.J. Pollock - CF Eric Hosmer - 1B Steven Souza - RF Christian Villanueva - 3B Nick Ahmed - SS Freddy Galvis - SS Chris Owings - 3B Carlos Asuaje - 2B John Ryan Murphy - C A.J. Ellis - C Clay Buchholz - RHP Joey Lucchesi - LHP

In yesterday’s recap, asteroid was asking about double-plays, after I mentioned that David Peralta was leading the team in this area. I thought I’d dig a bit more into this. It turns out there is a wide discrepancy across the team, both in double-play opportunities (some players are a lot more likely to come up with a runner on first and one out) and in the double-play rate (the percentage of times a GIDP results). Across the entire team, there have 709 double-play chances, resulting in 65 double-plays, a 9.2% rate. Below are, for each player with more than 10 chances, the number of opportunities and double-plays into which they have hit.

A couple of things stand out. While Peralta may have the highest number of double-plays, he also has the second-highest number of opportunities. His rate of 14.1% is above average but not disastrous. It may just be random chance, as the rate is a career high, with his overall figure being much more in line with the average, at 10.2%. If you’re looking for people who are really likely to hit into a double-play, Jay and Marrero are the candidates. They’ve combined for the same number of DPs as Peralta, in fewer than half the chances. At the other end of the spectrum, chalk up another thing Goldy is good at. His GIDP rate is only 2.1% Though, again, his career figure is 10.3%, making this year an outlier.

I would imagine the two main factors that go into DP rate is ground-ball rate and sprinting speed. Thanks to Statcast we now have stats for the latter, and we do see - perhaps a bit surprisingly - that Jay is faster only than the two catchers, Mathis and Avila. However, the wide variations in DP rate for a player, year to year, suggest that speed (which would be relatively constant) is not the main factor. If we look at the ratio of groundouts/fly outs this season, we find Jay and Peralta at the top: at 2.29, Jay’s rate is more than twice team average (1.12), while at the other end, Goldschmidt (0.86) and Descalso (0.56) do indeed have amongst the lowest DP percentages.