Baseball's Next Top Models

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."