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Defense Rocks!How Colorado's fielding wizardry will change baseball forever.

By Eriq Gardner
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007, at 2:21 PM ET
Shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. Click image to expand.

Baseball is usually seen as a clash between pitchers and hitters—a test of wills between the guy on the mound and the slugger at the plate. The defense, on the other hand, is praised and scorned in extreme circumstances, glimpsed only in the final few moments on Baseball Tonight, and all but ignored when sportswriters call upon team management to find nirvana by signing Johan Santana or Alex Rodriguez. But if there's ever a time to focus on the guys with gloves, it's the 2007 World Series. This year's Colorado Rockies are perhaps the greatest defensive team in baseball history. It's even possible that their defensive prowess will change the way the game is played and the way teams are constructed.

In 2003, Michael Lewis' Moneyball showed how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane used statistics to find undervalued players. Back then, these were typically guys like Scott Hatteberg who drew walks to keep innings going. By the time Lewis published the book, the secret was out and the art of plate discipline was no longer undervalued. Beane and other smart GMs around baseball had already moved on to the next great statistical frontier: defense.

Colorado seems like an odd laboratory to experiment with a team built around defense. The team plays at Coors Field, which sits a mile above sea level. High altitudes mean less break on pitches. Hard-hit balls travel farther because of the thin air, and when they don't go for home runs, they typically land in the stadium's spacious outfield. (Coors Field has the deepest fences in all of baseball.) In 2002, Joe Sheehan on Baseball Prospectus wrote that "the physics issues may preclude anyone from being a good defender at altitude."

In retrospect, though, Coors Field was the perfect place to probe the value of defense. The team has tried pretty much everything else since hiring GM Dan O'Dowd in 1999. O'Dowd has studied weather patterns, tried out a humidor to control scoring, and toyed with a four-man pitching rotation. Much of O'Dowd's work, such as research into the type of pitcher it would take to conquer Coors, resulted in bone-headed decisions like investing nearly $175 million in Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle. The team continued to lose, attendance fell, and the Sporting News belittled the club in 2002, saying they were "trotting out Plan G, or maybe it's Plan H."

Whatever plan they're on now, it's working. The Rockies enter this year's World Series with one of the least-experienced pitching staffs ever to reach the championship round. These pitchers struck out the third-fewest batters of any staff in baseball, walked the ninth-fewest batters, and—with an assist from Coors Field's ballyhooed humidor—kept home runs from being too much of a problem. In other words, the pitchers pitched to contact, daring opposing batters to put the ball into play.

The result?

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Eriq Gardner is a writer living in New York.
Photograph of shortstop Troy Tulowitzki of the Colorado Rockies by Jeff Gross/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Proclaiming the Rockies the best defensive team ever is, shall we say, just a tiny little bit over the top. Among other things, you might want to provide a comparison to some other great defensive teams, rather than making blanket assertions.

Consider, for instance, the Baltimore Orioles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Brooks Robinson, Mark Belanger and Paul Blair, who collectively won 22 Gold Gloves from 1967 to 1975, plus two different second basemen (Davey Johnson and Bobby Grich) who won 6 more between them. Robinson holds the record for the most Gold Gloves won by any player (tied with two pitchers), Belanger is 4th on the all-time list for shortstops and Blair is tied for 6th among outfielders.

Or, you might want to ponder the mid-1980s Cardinals, which featured Ozzie Smith (13 Gold Gloves), Willie McGee (3) and Andy Van Slyke (5), plus Terry Pendleton (3) and, for a time, Keith Hernandez (11), who often is thought of as the best defensive first baseman ever. You might remember Ozzie as the guy who figured out how to make a throw reach first quicker by bouncing it, and Hernandez as the guy who perfected the throw to second on a sacrifice bunt.

There are many other examples, of course. That's why it would be nice to have seen even the briefest explanation of why this team could be the best defensive team ever other than that they catch more balls in Coors than the average team.

I'd also be a bit more patient about suggesting that the Rockies' emphasis on defense could change the game. For one thing, if the Red Sox win the Series, GMs are likely to draw the opposite conclusion, particularly if Ramirez turns out to be a key player. For another, a one-time event generally is not enough to change anyone's mind. After all, if the Rockies had lost even one more game in September, they wouldn't be here now.

--randy-khan

(To reply, click here.)

(10/24)

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