Defense
markj111
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in Sports Talk
From SI.com
ASK TORII HUNTER where he ranks among the best defensive centerfielders, and he appears perplexed. "You mean, where I rank with guys now, or in history?" he says. The Angels' Hunter takes his defense as seriously as you'd expect from someone who says, "To catch a ball, I'd commit suicide." And to most of the baseball world, for that matter, it's conventional wisdom that he's one of the best fielders, period. Try to prod Hunter into naming another American League centerfielder in his class defensively, and he just shakes his head. The Indians' Grady Sizemore, perhaps? "Nah," Hunter says. "He's got some work to do. He takes bad jumps." The Tigers' Curtis Granderson? "He's up there, but he has to learn to take better routes," Hunter says. "You shouldn't dive as much as Grandy dives." Hunter's replacement in Minnesota last season, Carlos Gomez? "Dude is quick, but he also goes from points A to B to C to D when he should be going A to B," says Hunter. "And he's too aggressive with his throwing. Just look at his errors. [Gomez had eight.] I had none. Zero." He flashes a smile and shrugs. Case closed, as far as he's concerned.
And few would disagree. Certainly not the managers and coaches who last fall voted him to an eighth straight Gold Glove award. (Only five outfielders in history have won more.) Certainly not the Angels, who last winter lured him off the free-agent market with a $90 million contract, as much for his defensive reputation as his bat. And certainly not the fans, players, scouts and other baseball cognoscenti who favor traditional fielding statistics—errors, fielding percentage (Hunter's was a perfect 1.000) and putouts (his 350 were fifth among AL outfielders)—and watch the familiar sight of the 33-year-old gliding gracefully over the grass and, on occasion, scaling the outfield wall to rob a batter of a home run. To the eye, there is nothing to indicate that Hunter is anything but what he thinks he is: an elite centerfielder, the best in the American League, possibly one of the best ever to play the position.
But here's a flash for Hunter: Comparing players' defensive skills is no longer as scientific as sizing up Best Supporting Actress performances before the Oscars. In his first Bill James Abstract, in 1977, the oracle of statistical analysis lamented the inability to quantify defensive success with anything other than such antiquated statistics as errors and fielding percentage. It has taken three decades, but the mystery of defensive analysis, perhaps the last frontier in the statistical ether, has been cracked by sabermetricians who have devoted 15, 20 years to the cause. The clunkily named metrics that have emerged within the last five years may sound like topics at a symposium for mechanical engineers—Probablistic Model of Range, Defensive Regression Analysis, Special Aggregate Fielding Evaluation, Ultimate Zone Rating—but not only have they become accepted by analysts like James as accurate tools, they have also infiltrated the daily vernacular of front offices.
But major league clubhouses? Not so much. "The Probablistic Model of who?" asks Hunter, after he's told where he stands by measure of the metrics. Not only does he rate below Sizemore, below Granderson and below Gomez, Hunter was also regarded across the board as a merely average fielder, and in many instances, below average—which is the case according to Bill James's disciple John Dewan, author of The Fielding Bible and creator of the Plus/Minus Runs Saved metric, which six years ago did rank Hunter as the league's top centerfielder. Now Dewan's numbers show that Hunter has been steadily slowing down, and that last season he made plays on five fewer balls than an average centerfielder would be expected to make, costing the Angels four runs. The best defensive centerfielder in the AL? Dewan's calculations says it's Gomez, who tracked down 14 more balls than the average centerfielder and saved Hunter's old team 16 runs. "If I've lost a step, I'm still better than the average person," Hunter huffs. "When I need a walker, I'll go to rightfield and be the best rightfielder in the game."
In addition to telling us that Hunter is an average defensive outfielder, the metrics also suggest that the Yankees should relocate Derek Jeter, long rated by the metrics as the worst-fielding shortstop in baseball, to the outfield and that the Cubs' Alfonso Soriano, because of his strong arm, has saved more runs than any other leftfielder since moving from second base in 2006. In a poststeroid era, when scoring and home run totals have fallen as fast as the NASDAQ and speed and defense are becoming as important and as appreciated as they were during the Whiteyball days in St. Louis two decades ago, these metrics are becoming essential tools for winning organizations.
"There are still teams stuck in the Dark Ages," says one American League general manager, "but the secret's getting out. Defensive metrics have almost caught up to the offensive side. Some people would say they didn't think they'd see this day. But the revolution's here."
IN 1982 John Dewan was an actuary living in Chicago when a coworker handed him a copy of the Bill James Abstract. Dewan, a die-hard White Sox fan who grew up playing the baseball simulation board game Strat-O-Matic, was instantly hooked. Two years later he was sitting at his kitchen table reading one of James's articles about creating an organization of volunteers who would record detailed play-by-play information not found in the box scores of every major league game. "I put the book down, and I went to the phone and called directory assistance in Lawrence, Kansas," says Dewan. "I got Bill James's assistant on the line and signed up immediately."
Dewan became the director of the organization, Project Scoresheet, a year later while continuing to hold down his day job. Soon after quitting his actuary job in '87 to devote himself full-time to statistical analysis, he invented a metric called Zone Rating, in which he took play-by-play data and calculated the percentage of balls fielded by a player in his defensive zone, as well as balls outside of his zone. (By these metrics, Jeter always ranks among the lowest shortstops because he doesn't get to many balls outside a shortstop's zone.) Ten years later companies such as STATS Inc. and Baseball Info Solutions (which Dewan cofounded in 2002 with Steve Moyer) began hiring armies of new college grads who collectively would watch every game and keep a detailed log of what happened to every batted ball: what kind of pitch was hit, where the ball was hit, how hard it was hit, who fielded it and how it was or wasn't turned into an out.
THE DATA has given Dewan and other analysts the power to compute, with great precision, a player's ability to turn batted balls into outs. In 2003, in a forum on the website Baseball Think Factory, a professional poker player living in Las Vegas named Michtel Licthman introduced, in a 6,800-word primer, a metric that he called Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). Lichtman was crunching numbers with data he purchased from STATS Inc.—paying nearly $10,000 for it annually—and, like Dewan, was measuring the runs saved or lost by every fielder compared to the league average at his position. His UZR model was similar to the plus/minus system that Dewan had come up with, but with more parameters for each batted ball; among them, the ballpark, whether the pitcher and batter were left- or righthanded, and the ground ball and fly ball tendencies of the pitcher.
Gradually baseball people outside the sabermetrics community began to take notice. During spring training in '04, Dewan was giving a presentation to the White Sox' front office in the team cafeteria when manager Ozzie Guillen and his players wandered in to have lunch, their game that day having been rained out. Dewan noticed that Guillen would occasionally glance over at the presentation. Eventually he walked up to Dewan and started flipping through his statistical samples. "If they had this s--- when I was playing," the manager announced to the room, "I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived."
That same year the Cardinals hired Lichtman as a consultant. But during his time with the organization Lichtman was mostly frustrated that even a team open-minded enough to hire him—he had been recommended to the team's ownership by vice president of player personnel Jeff Luhnow—was so hesitant to embrace his analysis. "I met [manager] Tony La Russa once," says Lichtman, "and he had no interest in what I was saying. Tony was not into it; [general manager] Walt Jocketty was agnostic."
This winter Lichtman, who left the Cardinals after the 2005 season, made UZR—considered by many to be the most comprehensive defensive metric out there—available to the public on the website FanGraphs, which will update player stats weekly during the season. "The funny thing is, all this information is now available free for anyone to see, so there's really no reason for teams to do their own thing," says Lichtman. "Yet it's clear that half to three quarters of the teams still have no clue how to evaluate defense on that level and how to interpret that into a player's overall value."
The rays were one of the organizations that had a clue before most others did. One of the priorities of the Wall Street--trained front office that took over three years ago (a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Matt Silverman, is the Rays' president) was to put an advanced statistical model in place that could measure defense with the same precision that has been applied to offense for years. "It's been a big focus of ours to get to a point where we feel comfortable taking information that we get internally, statistically, and use it with what our scouts are saying," says general manager Andrew Friedman, who was an analyst at Bear Stearns. "We've come a long way." Like the more advanced organizations that over the past few years used Zone Rating and UZR and plus/minus as road maps in developing their own models, Tampa Bay's internal metrics are closely guarded, proprietary secrets.
The rest of baseball, however, is starting to catch on, perhaps no team more quickly than the Mariners, who last year were the major leagues' Ishtar—the biggest flop in history, the first team with a $100 million payroll to lose 100 games. A longtime scout who rose through the ranks because of his reputation as an effective talent evaluator, Jack Zduriencik would seem to be one of the least likely general managers to use UZR in a sentence. But the new Seattle G.M. has surrounded himself with advisers who have a sabermetric bent, such as Tom Tango (author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, cowritten with Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin) and Mat Olkin, formerly an analyst at STATS Inc. Zduriencik's top assistant is Tony Blengino, a former C.P.A. who was the Brewers' scouting director responsible for drafting and developing the acclaimed core of players that last year led Milwaukee to its first playoff appearance in 26 years. Zduriencik, the old-school scout, and Blengino, the numbers guy who keeps a copy of The Fielding Bible on his desk and can recite Revised Zone Rating stats of players off the top of his head, come from "pretty much the opposite ends of the spectrum," Zduriencik says. But this winter they were in agreement on how to turn the worst team in the league in '08 into a winner in the shortest amount of time. They would follow the blueprint of the worst-to-first '08 Rays: Focus on improving the defense.
"Last year Tampa scored 10 fewer runs than they did the year before," says Blengino. "Seventy percent of the innings pitched in 2008 were from the guys who pitched the year before. And yet they gave up 273 fewer runs. It wasn't the hitting. It wasn't the pitching. It was the defense."
Tampa's improvement—from the worst team in defensive efficiency in 2006 and '07 to the best last year—was the result of the front office's calculated effort, after the '07 season, to catch the ball better. They replaced the shortstop combo of Brendan Harris (-10.5 career UZR, meaning he cost his team nearly 11 runs) and Ben Zobrist (-7.5 career UZR) with Jason Bartlett (34.7 career UZR). They moved Akinori Iwamura from third to second (where his UZR was 1.3 runs higher) to accommodate the call-up of Evan Longoria (14.9 UZR), and they dumped Johnny Gomes (-16.9 career UZR) and Delmon Young (-18.1 career UZR) from the outfield. "People saw the drop in our pitchers' ERAs, and [the pitchers] did a great job," says Friedman, "but a lot of credit goes to the runs the defense saved. Based on our internal numbers, a lot of credit."
"If, for example, you can put together three defensive superstars in the outfield, that's an opportunity to save a lot of runs," says Blengino. "You can win with run prevention as easily as [with] runs scoring."
This off-season the Seattle front office put together a superstar defensive outfield. The Mariners were part of a three-team, 12-player trade with the Indians and the Mets in which they received eight players, including Franklin Gutierrez, who had an off-the-charts 21.8 UZR in rightfield last year while hitting .248 with eight home runs in Cleveland, and Endy Chavez, a fourth outfielder on the Mets, who has a .311 career OBP but had a 6.8 UZR in '08. On the days they play Gutierrez in center, Chavez in left and Ichiro Suzuki in right (how often that happens will depend on how much playing time manager Don Wakamatsu gives to Ken Griffey Jr.), the Mariners will have arguably three of the top 10 defensive outfielders in the majors on the field. Entering the 2009 season, the Mariners (who also have good gloves in the infield with Adrian Beltre at third and Jose Lopez at second) have a top five overall defense in the American League, and that's why, even with an offense projected to be one of the worst in the league, Seattle can conceivably contend in the AL West.
"Looking back through the years, most really good teams have had really good defense," says Blengino. "The Yankees have struggled defensively the last few years, but when they won, they didn't. With a really good defense, you can't be a bad team. You can be a .500 team. But it's hard to be really bad with a good defense."
THERE'S STILL much work to be done, of course. Some teams are still trying to get their heads around precisely how important defense is in relation to offense. The analysts are just beginning to get a clue. "Last year, based on my metrics, the Phillies' defense saved about 80 runs for the team," says Dewan. "The worst team, the Royals, lost 50 runs. The difference between the best defensive team in baseball and the worst defensive team in baseball is about 130 runs. On the batting side, the difference between the best and the worst team is about 260 runs. To think that the value of fielding is worth as much as half the value of offense, I don't think anyone would have thought that. That's a significant number."
When asked how much further defensive metrics can go, Lichtman says the analysts are "90 percent there." The other 10% will be reached when teams and companies such as Baseball Info Solutions and STATS Inc. start tracking the hang time of a ball and the exact positioning of a defender, as well as the player's route to the ball.
When that day comes, teams and statistical analysts alike will have a nearly complete picture of the value of a player. "After [the 2003 Michael Lewis best-seller] Moneyball, people stopped undervaluing on-base percentage, and now they've moved on to defense," says an American League G.M. "As teams are getting smarter and smarter, there will be no more secrets, nothing undervalued in the market."
There will be a day when metrics like UZR will be as accepted by the mainstream as they are in the sabermetrics community; a day when a player's plus/minus carries as much weight in a Rotisserie league as his offensive statistics; a day when a 33-year-old centerfielder who has lost a step won't be considered one of the best defensive outfielders in the game; a day when the eye and the brain will no longer be able to deceive.
Until then, the revolution continues.
ASK TORII HUNTER where he ranks among the best defensive centerfielders, and he appears perplexed. "You mean, where I rank with guys now, or in history?" he says. The Angels' Hunter takes his defense as seriously as you'd expect from someone who says, "To catch a ball, I'd commit suicide." And to most of the baseball world, for that matter, it's conventional wisdom that he's one of the best fielders, period. Try to prod Hunter into naming another American League centerfielder in his class defensively, and he just shakes his head. The Indians' Grady Sizemore, perhaps? "Nah," Hunter says. "He's got some work to do. He takes bad jumps." The Tigers' Curtis Granderson? "He's up there, but he has to learn to take better routes," Hunter says. "You shouldn't dive as much as Grandy dives." Hunter's replacement in Minnesota last season, Carlos Gomez? "Dude is quick, but he also goes from points A to B to C to D when he should be going A to B," says Hunter. "And he's too aggressive with his throwing. Just look at his errors. [Gomez had eight.] I had none. Zero." He flashes a smile and shrugs. Case closed, as far as he's concerned.
And few would disagree. Certainly not the managers and coaches who last fall voted him to an eighth straight Gold Glove award. (Only five outfielders in history have won more.) Certainly not the Angels, who last winter lured him off the free-agent market with a $90 million contract, as much for his defensive reputation as his bat. And certainly not the fans, players, scouts and other baseball cognoscenti who favor traditional fielding statistics—errors, fielding percentage (Hunter's was a perfect 1.000) and putouts (his 350 were fifth among AL outfielders)—and watch the familiar sight of the 33-year-old gliding gracefully over the grass and, on occasion, scaling the outfield wall to rob a batter of a home run. To the eye, there is nothing to indicate that Hunter is anything but what he thinks he is: an elite centerfielder, the best in the American League, possibly one of the best ever to play the position.
But here's a flash for Hunter: Comparing players' defensive skills is no longer as scientific as sizing up Best Supporting Actress performances before the Oscars. In his first Bill James Abstract, in 1977, the oracle of statistical analysis lamented the inability to quantify defensive success with anything other than such antiquated statistics as errors and fielding percentage. It has taken three decades, but the mystery of defensive analysis, perhaps the last frontier in the statistical ether, has been cracked by sabermetricians who have devoted 15, 20 years to the cause. The clunkily named metrics that have emerged within the last five years may sound like topics at a symposium for mechanical engineers—Probablistic Model of Range, Defensive Regression Analysis, Special Aggregate Fielding Evaluation, Ultimate Zone Rating—but not only have they become accepted by analysts like James as accurate tools, they have also infiltrated the daily vernacular of front offices.
But major league clubhouses? Not so much. "The Probablistic Model of who?" asks Hunter, after he's told where he stands by measure of the metrics. Not only does he rate below Sizemore, below Granderson and below Gomez, Hunter was also regarded across the board as a merely average fielder, and in many instances, below average—which is the case according to Bill James's disciple John Dewan, author of The Fielding Bible and creator of the Plus/Minus Runs Saved metric, which six years ago did rank Hunter as the league's top centerfielder. Now Dewan's numbers show that Hunter has been steadily slowing down, and that last season he made plays on five fewer balls than an average centerfielder would be expected to make, costing the Angels four runs. The best defensive centerfielder in the AL? Dewan's calculations says it's Gomez, who tracked down 14 more balls than the average centerfielder and saved Hunter's old team 16 runs. "If I've lost a step, I'm still better than the average person," Hunter huffs. "When I need a walker, I'll go to rightfield and be the best rightfielder in the game."
In addition to telling us that Hunter is an average defensive outfielder, the metrics also suggest that the Yankees should relocate Derek Jeter, long rated by the metrics as the worst-fielding shortstop in baseball, to the outfield and that the Cubs' Alfonso Soriano, because of his strong arm, has saved more runs than any other leftfielder since moving from second base in 2006. In a poststeroid era, when scoring and home run totals have fallen as fast as the NASDAQ and speed and defense are becoming as important and as appreciated as they were during the Whiteyball days in St. Louis two decades ago, these metrics are becoming essential tools for winning organizations.
"There are still teams stuck in the Dark Ages," says one American League general manager, "but the secret's getting out. Defensive metrics have almost caught up to the offensive side. Some people would say they didn't think they'd see this day. But the revolution's here."
IN 1982 John Dewan was an actuary living in Chicago when a coworker handed him a copy of the Bill James Abstract. Dewan, a die-hard White Sox fan who grew up playing the baseball simulation board game Strat-O-Matic, was instantly hooked. Two years later he was sitting at his kitchen table reading one of James's articles about creating an organization of volunteers who would record detailed play-by-play information not found in the box scores of every major league game. "I put the book down, and I went to the phone and called directory assistance in Lawrence, Kansas," says Dewan. "I got Bill James's assistant on the line and signed up immediately."
Dewan became the director of the organization, Project Scoresheet, a year later while continuing to hold down his day job. Soon after quitting his actuary job in '87 to devote himself full-time to statistical analysis, he invented a metric called Zone Rating, in which he took play-by-play data and calculated the percentage of balls fielded by a player in his defensive zone, as well as balls outside of his zone. (By these metrics, Jeter always ranks among the lowest shortstops because he doesn't get to many balls outside a shortstop's zone.) Ten years later companies such as STATS Inc. and Baseball Info Solutions (which Dewan cofounded in 2002 with Steve Moyer) began hiring armies of new college grads who collectively would watch every game and keep a detailed log of what happened to every batted ball: what kind of pitch was hit, where the ball was hit, how hard it was hit, who fielded it and how it was or wasn't turned into an out.
THE DATA has given Dewan and other analysts the power to compute, with great precision, a player's ability to turn batted balls into outs. In 2003, in a forum on the website Baseball Think Factory, a professional poker player living in Las Vegas named Michtel Licthman introduced, in a 6,800-word primer, a metric that he called Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). Lichtman was crunching numbers with data he purchased from STATS Inc.—paying nearly $10,000 for it annually—and, like Dewan, was measuring the runs saved or lost by every fielder compared to the league average at his position. His UZR model was similar to the plus/minus system that Dewan had come up with, but with more parameters for each batted ball; among them, the ballpark, whether the pitcher and batter were left- or righthanded, and the ground ball and fly ball tendencies of the pitcher.
Gradually baseball people outside the sabermetrics community began to take notice. During spring training in '04, Dewan was giving a presentation to the White Sox' front office in the team cafeteria when manager Ozzie Guillen and his players wandered in to have lunch, their game that day having been rained out. Dewan noticed that Guillen would occasionally glance over at the presentation. Eventually he walked up to Dewan and started flipping through his statistical samples. "If they had this s--- when I was playing," the manager announced to the room, "I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived."
That same year the Cardinals hired Lichtman as a consultant. But during his time with the organization Lichtman was mostly frustrated that even a team open-minded enough to hire him—he had been recommended to the team's ownership by vice president of player personnel Jeff Luhnow—was so hesitant to embrace his analysis. "I met [manager] Tony La Russa once," says Lichtman, "and he had no interest in what I was saying. Tony was not into it; [general manager] Walt Jocketty was agnostic."
This winter Lichtman, who left the Cardinals after the 2005 season, made UZR—considered by many to be the most comprehensive defensive metric out there—available to the public on the website FanGraphs, which will update player stats weekly during the season. "The funny thing is, all this information is now available free for anyone to see, so there's really no reason for teams to do their own thing," says Lichtman. "Yet it's clear that half to three quarters of the teams still have no clue how to evaluate defense on that level and how to interpret that into a player's overall value."
The rays were one of the organizations that had a clue before most others did. One of the priorities of the Wall Street--trained front office that took over three years ago (a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Matt Silverman, is the Rays' president) was to put an advanced statistical model in place that could measure defense with the same precision that has been applied to offense for years. "It's been a big focus of ours to get to a point where we feel comfortable taking information that we get internally, statistically, and use it with what our scouts are saying," says general manager Andrew Friedman, who was an analyst at Bear Stearns. "We've come a long way." Like the more advanced organizations that over the past few years used Zone Rating and UZR and plus/minus as road maps in developing their own models, Tampa Bay's internal metrics are closely guarded, proprietary secrets.
The rest of baseball, however, is starting to catch on, perhaps no team more quickly than the Mariners, who last year were the major leagues' Ishtar—the biggest flop in history, the first team with a $100 million payroll to lose 100 games. A longtime scout who rose through the ranks because of his reputation as an effective talent evaluator, Jack Zduriencik would seem to be one of the least likely general managers to use UZR in a sentence. But the new Seattle G.M. has surrounded himself with advisers who have a sabermetric bent, such as Tom Tango (author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, cowritten with Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin) and Mat Olkin, formerly an analyst at STATS Inc. Zduriencik's top assistant is Tony Blengino, a former C.P.A. who was the Brewers' scouting director responsible for drafting and developing the acclaimed core of players that last year led Milwaukee to its first playoff appearance in 26 years. Zduriencik, the old-school scout, and Blengino, the numbers guy who keeps a copy of The Fielding Bible on his desk and can recite Revised Zone Rating stats of players off the top of his head, come from "pretty much the opposite ends of the spectrum," Zduriencik says. But this winter they were in agreement on how to turn the worst team in the league in '08 into a winner in the shortest amount of time. They would follow the blueprint of the worst-to-first '08 Rays: Focus on improving the defense.
"Last year Tampa scored 10 fewer runs than they did the year before," says Blengino. "Seventy percent of the innings pitched in 2008 were from the guys who pitched the year before. And yet they gave up 273 fewer runs. It wasn't the hitting. It wasn't the pitching. It was the defense."
Tampa's improvement—from the worst team in defensive efficiency in 2006 and '07 to the best last year—was the result of the front office's calculated effort, after the '07 season, to catch the ball better. They replaced the shortstop combo of Brendan Harris (-10.5 career UZR, meaning he cost his team nearly 11 runs) and Ben Zobrist (-7.5 career UZR) with Jason Bartlett (34.7 career UZR). They moved Akinori Iwamura from third to second (where his UZR was 1.3 runs higher) to accommodate the call-up of Evan Longoria (14.9 UZR), and they dumped Johnny Gomes (-16.9 career UZR) and Delmon Young (-18.1 career UZR) from the outfield. "People saw the drop in our pitchers' ERAs, and [the pitchers] did a great job," says Friedman, "but a lot of credit goes to the runs the defense saved. Based on our internal numbers, a lot of credit."
"If, for example, you can put together three defensive superstars in the outfield, that's an opportunity to save a lot of runs," says Blengino. "You can win with run prevention as easily as [with] runs scoring."
This off-season the Seattle front office put together a superstar defensive outfield. The Mariners were part of a three-team, 12-player trade with the Indians and the Mets in which they received eight players, including Franklin Gutierrez, who had an off-the-charts 21.8 UZR in rightfield last year while hitting .248 with eight home runs in Cleveland, and Endy Chavez, a fourth outfielder on the Mets, who has a .311 career OBP but had a 6.8 UZR in '08. On the days they play Gutierrez in center, Chavez in left and Ichiro Suzuki in right (how often that happens will depend on how much playing time manager Don Wakamatsu gives to Ken Griffey Jr.), the Mariners will have arguably three of the top 10 defensive outfielders in the majors on the field. Entering the 2009 season, the Mariners (who also have good gloves in the infield with Adrian Beltre at third and Jose Lopez at second) have a top five overall defense in the American League, and that's why, even with an offense projected to be one of the worst in the league, Seattle can conceivably contend in the AL West.
"Looking back through the years, most really good teams have had really good defense," says Blengino. "The Yankees have struggled defensively the last few years, but when they won, they didn't. With a really good defense, you can't be a bad team. You can be a .500 team. But it's hard to be really bad with a good defense."
THERE'S STILL much work to be done, of course. Some teams are still trying to get their heads around precisely how important defense is in relation to offense. The analysts are just beginning to get a clue. "Last year, based on my metrics, the Phillies' defense saved about 80 runs for the team," says Dewan. "The worst team, the Royals, lost 50 runs. The difference between the best defensive team in baseball and the worst defensive team in baseball is about 130 runs. On the batting side, the difference between the best and the worst team is about 260 runs. To think that the value of fielding is worth as much as half the value of offense, I don't think anyone would have thought that. That's a significant number."
When asked how much further defensive metrics can go, Lichtman says the analysts are "90 percent there." The other 10% will be reached when teams and companies such as Baseball Info Solutions and STATS Inc. start tracking the hang time of a ball and the exact positioning of a defender, as well as the player's route to the ball.
When that day comes, teams and statistical analysts alike will have a nearly complete picture of the value of a player. "After [the 2003 Michael Lewis best-seller] Moneyball, people stopped undervaluing on-base percentage, and now they've moved on to defense," says an American League G.M. "As teams are getting smarter and smarter, there will be no more secrets, nothing undervalued in the market."
There will be a day when metrics like UZR will be as accepted by the mainstream as they are in the sabermetrics community; a day when a player's plus/minus carries as much weight in a Rotisserie league as his offensive statistics; a day when a 33-year-old centerfielder who has lost a step won't be considered one of the best defensive outfielders in the game; a day when the eye and the brain will no longer be able to deceive.
Until then, the revolution continues.
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