wezen-ball: The Red Sox and All-Glove, No-Bat Players

Plus…anytime you get a chance to say Hughie Critz. You use it.

The biggest observation here is just hard it was to find good examples of all-glove-no-hit players at the most offensive-minded positions, LF, RF and 1B. I guess it just goes to show how highly clubs value offense at those positions. Conversely, it was incredibly easy to find examples at SS, 2B, and CF. I should also note just how crazy those numbers for Mazeroski and Belanger look. There have never been two players in the history of baseball whose value was so heavily skewed towards their defense as Maz and Belanger. Ozzie Smith, for example, has more defensive value than Belanger (266 defensive runs vs. 256), but his offensive value was much closer to average (-47 offensive runs vs. -213). It really is amazing what those two did with the glove in their day.

I’ll leave it up to the theory and simulation experts to tell me just what a team like this would do in a 162-game season (to make things interesting, vary the pitching staffs for the squad, from 2009 Brewers to 2009 Giants, to see how they’d change). It should be pretty clear, though, that the 2010 Red Sox lineup is nothing like the one I’ve shown here. There are plenty of bats in the lineup, whether they’re balanced out by defense or not. The “defense first” mantra that Theo Epstein is supposedly following this winter might be a real thing, but it’s far from the drastic change that some are making it out to be. It might be fun to see a team so extraordinary, defensively, that it looks like they’re playing with a 10th player on the field, but even Theo knows that that won’t work today. Instead, I just hope that Red Sox writers and fans can take a deep breath and trust the moves of a GM who has given them two World Series victories this decade.