Hey You Know Whose Defense Sucks? Ours

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THT Live:Team Defense is Incredibly Underrated
Published 5/12/2008 by Matthew Carruth at The Hardball Times
Team Defense is Incredibly Underrated by Matthew Carruth May 12, 2008 Jeff Sullivan and I were looking around Baseball-Reference's team BABIP numbers a bit and, to paraphrase Jeff's words : Part of it has to do with the batted ball profile yielded by the pitching staff, but if the Rays keep up their current pace, their 2008 defense would be 248 plays better than their 2007 defense would be with the same pitching staff. Using Tango's number that 1 extra out ~ 0.8 runs saved, that’s nearly 200 runs, which is about 20 wins given the standard 8-10 runs per win theory. ...

Lookout Landing: Hey You Know Whose Defense Sucks? Ours
Published 5/13/2008 at BBTF's Baseball Primer Newsblog
Lookout Landing: Hey You Know Whose Defense Sucks? Ours To date, the Mariners have turned 19 fewer balls in play into outs than you’d expect given their groundballs/fly balls/line drives against. This has cost them ~15 runs and goes a long way towards explaining why the team ERA is higher than the team FIP despite a pretty good strand rate and a better-than-average number of infield flies. That’s really bad. Not convinced that defense matters? While screwing around at one point over the weekend, Matthew and I saw that the difference in BABIP against for the 2001 and 2007 ...

Quality Defense, Pitching Spark Rangers To 5-2 Win
Published 5/14/2008 by Joey Matschulat at Baseball Time in Arlington
... And the lineup, despite being minus Milton Bradley’s intimidating offensive presence, methodically scrapped out five runs on just seven hits, thanks in large part to some timely defensive blunders on the part of a poor Mariners defensive unit that ranks near the bottom of the league in several vital statistical categories. Catcher ...