Defensive Statistics

Baseball Think Factory is an excellent site for anyone that likes sabrmetric analysis. Although sometimes complicated for the average fan, they always have interesting articles evaluating some fascet of the game. Just recently, Write Chris Dial posted an article utilzing the Runs Saved by Position statistic, that he has worked on for a while, to analyze defense in the American League. The calculations for the statistic may be difficult to understand for the average reader, but click HERE if you want to look at his methods. Anyway, according to this statistic, this is how certain Jays players fared defensively this past season:

Name	Innings	RSpt	RSpt/150
Bengie Molina	842	-6	-10
Lyle Overbay	1233	0	0
Aaron Hill	912	16	24
Troy Gluas	1175	-7	-8
John McDonald	662.7	1	1
Reed Johnson	635.3	5	11
Frank Catalanotto	760	-2	-4
Vernon Wells	1290.3	12	13
Alex Rios	953	11	16

The RSpt is Runs Saved by Position which essentially is a statistic utilizing defensive innings at position, avg number a team plays in a season, the zone rating avg for that position and a few others. CLICK HERE for the article! The Jays had 4 players in the American League top 5 of their positions according to this statistic: Aaron Hill (1st), Reed Johnson (4th), Vernon Wells (2nd) and Alex Rios (1st). Actually pretty interesting is the fact that the Oakland A's players including Gold Glover Eric Chavez did not rate that highly in this statistic even with all the talk of how great their defense was. They had three top five players however in Mark Ellis, Bobby Crosby and Milton Bradley.