At all levels—communications from the team itself, national media, and local media both traditional and new-age—Carlos Correa has been praised for the staying power of his defense this year. The truth, though, is that he’s no longer good enough at shortstop, and needs to slide over.
It was not a good week for Carlos Correa at shortstop
In fact, it hasn’t been a good month, and (despite a few strong plays and his ironclad reputation) it hasn’t been a good year, either.
At 30 years old, the Twins’ star shortstop is looking less and less like one—a shortstop, that is, although since he’s not hitting well, he’s also looking less and less like a star.
Last week, Baseball Prospectus released an expansion and update to its model for fielding evaluation.
Prospectus’s value metric for fielders is called Defensive Runs Prevented (DRP), and its backbone is Range Defense Added (RDA).
The latter is meant to capture the number of balls a player reaches and converts to outs, above or below the number an average defender would be expected to reach and convert in the same array of opportunities.
Along with a move to expand one of the components of RDA—Attempt Range, a measurement of how many balls a player gets to, above or below average—to all infielders, the update also corrected some former biases in apportioning responsibility to infielders based on the reported location of batted balls.
On the other side of all that, here are Correa’s RDA, Attempt Range, and DRP totals for each season since 2021:
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Season Attempt Range RDA Outs DRP
2021 3 7.5 5.5
2022 -3 2.6 1.9
2023 -10 0 0
2024 -2 -1 -1.7
2025 -11 -3.4 -2.4
That’s about as clear a linear trend as you could ask for. Keep in mind, too, that these are counting stats.
For instance, if we prorated Correa’s 2024 performance to about the same number of innings he played in each of the previous three years, he’d have been closer to 2.5 runs worse than average.
If he plays all season the way he has so far, he’ll be about 5 runs worse than average, in similar playing time to that over which he was better than average in 2022 and exactly average in 2023.
Specifically, the Attempt Range column is telling us that Correa is getting worse at getting to the ball.
He still has a very strong arm, a good internal clock, and a certain brilliance when it comes to taking a lead runner or converting a tough chopper into a double play. He just doesn’t have the range you need from a shortstop in the majors.
That probably hits you funny, because Correa is still widely praised for his glovework.
That’s not entirely without merit. You can, indeed, see him make very good plays from time to time, and he rarely makes an ugly mistake. According to Sports Info Solutions and their Defensive Runs Saved evaluation framework, he’s had a neutral or positive rating when it comes to Good Fielding Plays versus Defensive Misplays and Errors for every season since 2019. However, even DRS shows him nosing steeply downward, including this year.
He’s struggled going to his left for a few years, now, but in 2025, he’s also not getting outs on balls to his right as well as he used to.
Numbers—especially defensive numbers—can be hard to take at face value, though. Let’s take a walk through the last week (just one week) of defense for Correa, to see this problem in a more undeniable form.
