They wear gloves for a reason

SI.com's Tim Marchman discovers that good defense --> run prevention --> good times.

A near iron law of baseball holds that if you can't quite tell why a team is good, it's probably good at defense.

[Just an atrocious sentence.]

On Tuesday, I had a chance to test this theory against 17 innings of observation when the first-place Seattle Mariners played a straight doubleheader over a cold afternoon and evening in Chicago.

[Iron Law = A Theory?]

It isn't just skill at work here. Like other teams, the Mariners put real thought into positioning.

[Not *every* team though. (See, Mets-- cross-ref Murphy, Daniel)]

"There's obviously three ways of looking at defending a batter," explains manager Don Wakamatsu. "Number one is you look at their sprays versus a left-hander or a right-hander pitching. Number two is you look at what hitters do off your pitcher individually. Number three is the individual matchups.

[Am I just not reading that last part correctly? #2 = #3, right?]

If the Mariners know that no one ever pulls Erik Bedard's curveball, for instance, they can pull the left fielder all the way toward center field at certain times.

[Wouldn't that tip-off the batter as to what pitch is coming?]

Last year, going by Ultimate Zone Rating, a sophisticated defensive statistic based on play-by-play data, the pennant winners were streets ahead of any other team in the field, saving more than 30 runs on defense above what the third-best team did.

[Cool-- I didn't want to know how UZR was calculated anyway. Knowing that it is "sophisticated" is good enough for me.]

"The bottom line is efficiency," he says, "This game is about pitch economy. The team that throws less pitches generally wins." It's an obvious point, but one apparently overlooked by teams such as New York's two clubs, who have struggled in part because of lousy pitching that hasn't been helped by lousy defense.

[2005 Mets: 83-79; 2006 Mets: 97-65; 2007 Mets: 88-74; 2008 Mets: 89-73.

2005 Yankees: 95-67; 2006 Yankees: 97-65; 2007 Yankees: 94-68; 2008 Yankees: 89-73.

2005 Mariners: 69-93; 2006 Mariners: 78-84; 2007 Mariners: 88-74; 2008 Mariners: 61-101.

Yup. This article is going great so far.]

Either way, the wins count the same. The Mariners are on pace to improve on last year's UZR total by about 80 runs....

[OK, got it. Good UZR numbers = Good Defense.]

Granting that it's early and that UZR, like any statistic, has its quirks -- right now it rates spectacularly inept Mets left fielder Daniel Murphy among the better defenders in the game...

[njhfdsahnifdsyuinjkldfajknl]

...this would seem to suggest the Seattle Mariners is for real.

[This article are FAIL.]

The NBA Playoffs: Dreadful, but humorously so

With the exception of the Bulls-Celtics series, the rest of the '09 NBA Playoffs have been completely unwatchable (and even the Bulls-Celtics is a tough sell with the TV networks highlighting every Garnett F-bomb). The Hornets lost to Denver 121-63 a few days ago. Brutal. Just go ahead and call me when LeBron and Kobe meet in the finals. Until then, here is an amusing Playoff entry from SI's Scott Howard-Cooper.

It's foolish to put too much stock in one quote after one game, especially a game with the emotions of a season-ending defeat, but just try disregarding the Jerry Sloan assessment of Utah reserve point guard Ronnie Price in the televised news conference Monday.

[But that would be foolish!]

"I've never seen a guy play that hard in my life in that situation," the Jazz coach said.

[OK.]

It's Sloan, the most anti-hyperbole guy in the NBA and possibly the world, so: Wow.

[The most anti-hyperbole guy in THE WORLD.

Anti-hyperbole.

The World.

Wow is right.]