Posted by Matt Sisson on Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 9:21 am

After becoming the first team to lose 100 games with a $100MM payroll, the Seattle Mariners needed to make a significant change in the way they ran their club. What better way than to copy what made the Tampa Bay Rays so successful last season…improve their defense. In Sports Illustrated’s the 2009 Baseball Preview, there’s an excellent article by Albert Chen titled Baseball’s Next Top Models that states, among a number of other things, the increased use of defensive metrics by a number of team’s considered to be using “cutting edge” information to improve their teams.

So just how important is defense to a team? John Dewan, who I had the chance to meet at the 2009 MIT Sports Analytics Conference, is author of The Fielding Bible and The Fielding Bible II. Dewan says 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.”

So far the people in charge in Seattle have made significant strides in improving the people they ask questions to. They’ve brought in like minded people who all have the same goal, “Get better Fast.” Chen states:

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.

That’s a pretty good team to bring in if you ask me. If Seattle can dramatically improve their defense, they may have a better season than people expect. “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.” Coming into the 2009 season, Seattle has made some off season moves that have brough in a number of new players to the organization. The right people are in place to improve the defense but just how good of a job did the Mariners front office do to get better in 2009? Chen seems to think they have a shot.

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.

The biggest defensive liability for the Seattle ourfield will be Ken Griffy Jr. The Fielding Bible II rates Griffey in the bottom 5 of right fielders, 29th out of 30 to be exact with only Brad Hawpe being worse. The Fielding Bible II also lists fellow Mariner Franklin Gutierrez as the best rightfielder in the game. The FBII states that Griffey has lost a lot of his arm and range and instead of stealing hits from players, he’s now mearly preventing an occasional extra-base hit. From 2006-08 Griffey has a -14 runs saved rating. Not the sort of player a team should bring in who wants to get better defensively but defense won’t sell tickets in Seattle and someone has to get people in the door. With these types of numbers, I’d expect a majority of his time to be in the DH position with an occasional start in Left.

Guitierrez’s defensive prowess is pretty amazing…even more so when compared to that of Kid Grif. From 2006-08 Guiterrez posted a +34 runs saved rating with 22 of those runs coming during the 2008 season when his playing time increase to 134 games. FBII describes him as having a rocket arm that discourages runners from trying to take extra bases with excellent timing and a smooth and graceful way of play. He covers plenty of ground and has lead MLB in right field plus/minus the last two seasons with totals of +29 and +20 while only playing 97 and 88 games in right, respectively. In three years, Gutierrez made a total of 92 plays outside of his zone while posting a .938 zone rating, also the best of any right fielder.

If the Seattle defense can play as well as the numbers suggest, they should be able to take a big step forward from where they ended the ‘08 season. They still have a lot of work to do but they’re heading in the right direction.

“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.”

For more info on the Seattle Mariners and their 2009 outlook, check their 2009 Season Preview written by Timmy Davis.