Dee-Fense!!!

It's accepted wisdom in baseball that you need good defense up the middle to win championships, and the corresponding theory of Strat is that means you need at least 2's, 3's at worst, at SS, 2B, and CF. Is it true? Just how important is defense?

I had an interesting take on it while playing Castaic in the recent playoff series with Conn River, sitting in for Steve Maljan while he's recuperating from surgery. It didn't really hit me until I looked out on the field at my defense in about the third game, and realized that I had at least a 2 at every position except catcher, where Rod Barajas was a 3 (but with a -1 arm), and 1st base, where Lyle Overbay was a 3. Plus, I had 1's in centerfield (Andruw Jones) and shorstop (Jack Wilson). Considering that my Westpark team usually sported a lineup containing no fewer than five 4's, this was a welcome change of pace.

And then it dawned on me. One of the great advantages Strat has over baseball is in the evaluation of defense. In real baseball, despite the addition of metrics like range factors and zone ratings, measuring defense still remains highly subjective. Not so in Strat: while fans can debate who's the better fielder in real life, Rafael Furcal or Jack Wilson, in the Strat game, Wilson's a 1 and Furcal is a 2, and that settles that.

What's really great is that you can also measure exactly the effect of the defense, because the game keeps track of that. If you look at the "2nd Grand Totals" in the League Stats page, you'll find the totals for X-chances, X-outs, and X-percentage. The X-chances, of course, are the times in the games where you get that "ss(X)" dice roll, and the result of the play is determined by that defender's range and error rating. That happened a little over 5 times a game per team during the season.

For the league, that play turned into an out 72% of the time, on average. Some teams were worse, like Appleton and Westpark at 66%. One team, though was way above the league average: Steve Maljan's Quakes, at 82%. What did that mean in real numbers, though? Castaic had 794 X-chances during the season, converting 651 of them into outs. Had its defense performed at the league average, it would have converted only 572 of those chances into outs. In short, Castaic converted about 79 fielding chances into outs that would have been hits or errors with a league-average defense.

That's not a lot; it works out to less than one every two games. It's not going to be spaced like that, and a hit instead of an out at the wrong time can be disastrous in the context of a single game, especially considering that that hit could be a two-base error, a double, or even a triple. On the other hand, there are a lot of times when it won't mean anything. Assuming that 2.3 of the "unconverted" chances equal one run (which is generous), that's about 34 runs over the course of a season, or about 3 wins. That doesn't mean you should feel comfortable about playing 4's at 2B and SS. But Jack Wilson's glove isn't going to be enough to make up for Rafael Furcal's bat.

And in a short series, you're not sure if defense is going to show up. In the 6-game playoff series with Conn River, Castaic converted only 66% of their X-chances; the Patriots converted 86%, but still won only 2 games. I don't know how many hits Andruw Jones prevented with his glove, but I doubt it was equal to the 6 home runs and 11 RBI he hit.