If the achilles heel of last year’s team was its offense, then surely its saving grace was its defense. With two gold gloves, promising rookie play from Aaron Hill, and another solid year behind the plate from Zaun the Blue Jays were able to rely on their defense to bail their pitches out of numerous jams. The big question for this team coming into the new year is simply: will the new defense cost the team more runs than the revamped offense?
This is a fair question, and a dangerous one. I say “dangerous” mostly because the question is one that naturally leads into a SABRmetric discussion; which I am sure that nobody here wants to get into. Baseball is the great ‘game of statistics,’ and beyond the primary and secondary stats (counting stats, averages and composites) there is a whole breed of analytical stats (Value Over Replacement Player, WARP, OPS+, ERA+, etc.) that are simultaneously illuminating and misleading. They offer a tactile, easy-to-understand (most of the time) and measurable analysis of a player’s performance. At the same time they mislead us by offering subjective analyses as objective facts. Each computational statistical measurement has to strike a balance between measurable performance and circumstantial context, and in doing so overexposes one facet of performance while potentially obscuring another.
I bring all this up because really, I am torn between two strategies for discussing the new defense: do I offer a “raw impressions” and tools evaluation of defense, or a statistical analysis? The answer is, “I don’t know the answer.” Rather, all I can do is say “I thinkt he defense will be weaker, but the team is improved overall” and talk about the great statistical debate. Hopefully someone can chime in and help me out in this discussion.
Next time I will talk about the pitching, and I can definitely get into that without any sort of hermeneutical discourse.