Defense part 2: bbref WARs

[Olerud363]

So when I heard AA talk about defense the other day it just sounded like a bunch of ******** by a guy who just wants to keep his job. Throw something to the suits. Give some complicated mumbo jumbo that "defense" is the problem. Not offense, not pitching, not age, not injuries, not "greneral incompentence and vast insults to the Bill James way of thinking".

 

I thought I'd look at some numbers... take this with a grain of salt, if you have numbers from other systems I'd be very interested to see them. Here are the bbfef offense, defense and pitching WARs for the contenders and Toronto. Among this group (I didn't consider all teams just Toronto compared to the best teams) Toronto is second last in offense, last in pitching and 3rd last in defense. They are about 11 wins behind the best offense, about 15 wins behind the best pitching, and 4.5 wins behind the best defense.

 

So the problem is defence?? The problem is bad team in all areas. The defense isn't great. But according to these numbers moving the defense to elite (assuming it could be done without affecting offense) wouldn't help much. Maybe get the 14th overall pick instead of the 11th. And if the offense took a step back?? Get another 11th pick.

 

Oakland and Detroid have the worst defenses... but it doesn't matter because of good pitching and offense (at first I was surprised by the Oakland numbers... but then took a look at the park factor, Oakland is a good offensive team playing in a pitchers park).

 

Any other numbers or ways to look at this??

 

Team oWar, dWar, pWar (from bbref)

 

Boston 28.9 2.9 17.5

Detroit 26.6 -2 22.9

Oakland 22.1 -2.6 15.6

Texas 19.8 4.7 17.1

Tampa 21.4 0.5 12.2

Baltimore 19.4 4.8 9.3

New York 11.5 2.1 14.8

 

Toronto 18.1 0.2 7.6

[flafson]

He didn't say defense was the problem, he said pitching was the problem and now that defense is better, he over looked defense the past year and maybe he shouldn't have. I think if we had Goins glove at 2B from the beginning we might have been a few games better off just on his defense, is it enough? Probably not because we had no pitching.

[ElNik2013]

He didn't say defense was the problem, he said pitching was the problem and now that defense is better, he over looked defense the past year and maybe he shouldn't have. I think if we had Goins glove at 2B from the beginning we might have been a few games better off just on his defense, is it enough? Probably not because we had no pitching.

 

 

I don't understand why people keep saying "we had no pitching". The pitching tanked, but coming into this year, people were arguing that this rotation could be top 5 in MLB, many thought Morrow and JJ would be the real aces of the staff, but anyway, that's all in the past.

[GD]

I think if we had Goins glove at 2B from the beginning we might have been a few games better off just on his defense, is it enough?

 

This again?

[flafson]

Pitching tanked, yes. But, one of the reason was that most of them were too fragile, we only have 2 consistent pitchers.

[John_Havok]

I think when you take into account that the Jays have allowed the 2nd most runs and third most Earned runs in all of baseball, yet scored the 9th most, you would realize that run prevention, not run scoring was far more responsible for the Jays not scoring more than their opponents.