Here's the thing about pitching, defense and run prevention. It may not be the most glamorous way to put together a playoff team, but it's definitely the cheapest.
Mike Cameron, Marco Scutaro and Adrian Beltre are among the most-skilled defensive players in baseball at their respective positions. If each stays healthy and has a productive season in 2010 for the Red Sox, you could make a case for any one of them being the very best.
And the best defensive player, in absolutely every single case imaginable, is always going to be cheaper than the best offensive one. Who would you rather pay: Cameron, Scutaro and Beltre, or Grady Sizemore, Hanley Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez? No-brainer.
But the hope is that despite being picked up on the (relatively) cheap, those three guys can make the difference between a 90-win season as also-rans in the AL East, and a playoff run. That's a big difference, especially in this competitive division — a lot is hinging on a couple of good gloves.
So how big a difference can three defensive upgrades (or four, if you include Jacoby Ellsbury sliding over to left in Jason Bay's old place) make? Will they add up to three wins? Five? Eight?
Even Bill James, the godfather of baseball statistical analysis, is unsure. If there's anyone that knows how to crunch these numbers, it's him — but even the godfather of sabermetrics is still left wondering.
"What I’m most curious about in 2010 is how much better we’re going to be defensively," James told The Boston Globe last Friday. "I don’t think anyone questions that we’re going to have a better defensive team. But are we going to be as much better defensively as we want to believe we are, and is that going to have as much impact on [the pitching staff] as we hope it does?"
There are a multitude of interconnected factors. The Red Sox had a 4.35 team ERA last season (sixth best in the American League) and a defensive efficiency (percentage of batted balls turned into outs) of .677, which was second worst. If those numbers improve in 2010, to whom is the credit due? To Cameron and Scutaro for improving the team's defense up the middle? To Victor Martinez, who gives the Red Sox some added strength behind the plate? Or to the pitching staff?
With all of these different factors being tied together, it's hard to isolate one make-or-break difference. Even James, a Red Sox consultant for the last six years, isn't sure how to evaluate the team's defense.
“The only difference between our ability to evaluate defense and offense at this point is confidence," James told the Globe. "Defense, at this point, can be evaluated with the same degree of precision and the same degree of agreement among different methods as offense. … We haven’t been doing it all our lives. We’ve had pretty good methods now for five or six years."
But whether confident or not, the Red Sox are leading a movement toward a new way of looking at the construction of a baseball team. That's not to say that they're alone. The Rays, Dodgers and Yankees all have worked in recent years on making their squads more efficient defensively. It's paying off.
This is how baseball has evolved. A decade ago, it was on-base percentage that GMs and front offices were undervaluing — teams like Oakland, Houston, Cleveland and yes, Boston, were able to make their offenses more efficient by minimizing their offensive outs and making the most of every plate appearance. Now it's defense that's seeing a revival.
By staying at the forefront of innovative thinking about baseball, the Red Sox can stay on top in the AL East.
How many wins is an improved defense worth? No one's really sure. But as long as the Sox are back in the playoffs in 2010, no one will much care. That's the bottom line.
