A CITIZEN'S BLOG

I was busy writing my 2005 preview posts the other day when I noticed that ESPN had taken team fielding and individual comparisons off their stat page. They have left them on their individual team pages.

I'm supremely annoyed, surprised and disappointed to see ESPN remove defensive stats from their main stats page and I hope it is only a temporary situation. Just a few months ago, right here on ESPN.com, Peter Gammons noted that defense was the "Next Big Thing" in baseball. Bloggers have been giving defense a lot of thought and have been applying interesting theories to the problem of rating what is the most "team" aspect of the game. Mike Humphries Defensive Regression Analysis (DRA) and Dave Pinto's Probalistic Model of Range (PMR), both of which came out just this winter, have been two tremendous pieces of work that will be discussed for a long time to come. Defense is on the cutting edge, so it is sad to see defense take a backseat at ESPN.

Sad, and incomprehensable. ESPN.com wants to be the one-stop clearinghouse for all of our stat needs, and I give them tremendous credit for being a terrific repository of information. That said, I rely on stats like ZR and Range Factor to calculate how the Phillies are doing defensively and you pretty much can't get defensive stats anywhere else. This will impact the quality of the information that I disseminate and it will impact how much I rely on ESPN.com for my informational needs. Too bad.

Ah, they did leave their much-maligned section on Productive Outs on the stats page.

Snort.