I think baseball and basketball are more comparable, because each player is required to play offense and defense. both sports are hard to judge the impact of a players defense. the only difference is in baseball there are some positions like shortstop that are considered more important for defense as opposed to basketball where it is team specific. battier is here for his defense. everett is also.
The only difference? What about the fact that a SS might make half a dozen defensive plays all game, whereas a defender in basketball is playing defense all night and guarding his man every time up the floor. Or the fact that a team can exploit a defensive weakness in basketball far easier than in baseball. Or the fact that the pitcher (making good pitches) is the main factor limiting runs in a baseball game, not the individual defenders? Max was right the first time, you really can't draw comparisons. Defense is important in both sports, but otherwise it's night and day.
those are all different scenarios that I can easily make comparisons to the nba. like the pitcher can make up for lack of defense, so can a guy like hakeem in basketball. a defender in a basketball game isn't going to stop his man everytime down court, the point is getting key stops, lets say at the end of the game where his man might get the last couple of shots. which is exactly what battier advocates claim, those few times of diving for loose balls, getting a key rebound or a key defensive stop that might make the difference between winning and losing.
You can have a good defense without a great shotblocker like Hakeem, if the rest of the guys play good team defense. On the other hand, I don't care how good Adam Everett is, he can't make up for bad pitchers like Wandy or Zeke or Taylor Buckholz. Hakeem was a defensive force, but he never impacted a basketball game defensively in the same way a good starting pitcher impacts the score of a baseball game. That's why starting pitching is the most prized commodity in baseball, despite the fact that a SP only pitches every 5th game. And every point counts in basketball, a good defensive stop in the first period helps as much as a good stop in the last 2 minutes. A guy who only plays good D in limited spurts is a bad defender.
its the same thing in baseball, the only difference in the sports is that points are always being scored in basketball. the times that baseballs aren't being hit to a particular defender, he is still a good defender. the only difference is that points aren't being scored, a good defender in basketball is always being scored on. but there are only a few possessions in a game when you need him to make an actual stops, just like there are only a few times in a baseball game like last night with willy that you need actual stops. if either player in either sport doesn't make those stops, then we don't consider them good defenders. in the nba, no one shuts a good offensive player down for the entire game. as far as the pitcher comparison, hakeem in the years that championships were won absolutely impacted the entire game on defense. if he hadn't been the defensive player he was, the weaknesses of the point guards on defense on those teams would have been a big limitation on the rockets. its not just actual shot blocks, if you got a guy who has a reputation of shot blocking guarding the basket, it changes the other team's offense.
I would put up with the errors for more pop in the bat and a higher batting average. Our pitcher are good enough and can get out of the occasional error, our run support is what is lacking. I would love to replace Everett and Ausmus, but at the very least ONE of them has to go. DD
This is the worst misconception in all of baseball. Because Piazza can hit, and he has a good relationship with his pitchers, he's a valuable player. The guy single-handedly did more to make his teams worse than any player in the league. He was such a bad defensive catcher that it removed the low pitch as an option for pitchers and made the entire staff worse. It is no suprise that his teams were almost always mediocre or worse.
i know YOU would. he's gotta have a lot more pop in his bat than Lugo for me to replace Everett. by the way, Everett has about 20 more RBI's than him this season.
I checked this out and it shocked me. If you look at actual runs produced (R+RBI-HR), Everett has 5 more than Lugo and the same amount as Khalil Greene, albeit with more ABs.
The difference between Lugo and Everett's BAs over the course of 500 ABs is ~18 hits. That's one extra hit every 27 ABs. You know, we'd be competing with the Mets for homefield if we had Lugo.
lugo bats .290. everett bats .240. what do you the think the difference is in that in terms or real production? not enough to give up the best defensive SS in the game. it's just not. we had lugo. he contributed in throwing away a playoff series for us. no, thanks.
