Getting Defensive
That’s the title of an excellent article today at Baseball Prospectus by Ben Lindbergh. In it, Lindbergh discusses the impact that defense can have on a pitching staff, and how the Rays optimized a bunch of roster shifts and defensive changes to achieve success in 2008. Actually that’s oversimplifying the article. Go read it, it’s good stuff.
On a related note, it occurs to me that there are so many good writers out there doing so much good work on baseball, it ends up greatly informing anyone trying to write a book on the topic. The bibliography/references in Unnamed Rays Book (Spring ’10), from BP to FanGraphs, the Hardball Times to the St. Pete Times, is going to be enormous. People like Marc Topkin, Shawn Hoffman, Dave Cameron, Marc Lancaster, Nate Silver, Tommy Rancel (everyone at DRays Bay, really) and many others have written some tremendously informative, thought-provoking pieces in just the past year or so, never mind all the good stuff that was written further back in history. This adds one more to the mix.
