First Base: Albert Pujols

I think I have mentioned this here before ... Albert Pujols did not finish first-team All-Metro in The Kansas City Star. I don’t bring this up to mock the man responsible for this Dewey Defeats Truman blunder – though that’s always fun – but more to bring up the sad explanation he offers. He always that Pujols was a terrible defensive shortstop in high school and, as such, not worthy of making the team.

(This friend is not one who easily admits he was wrong. He has made numerous fairly remarkable statements about various Royals including, at different times, calling Zack Greinke “a genius” and “a bust.” He remains convinced that he’s right about both, and with Zack, I guess, anything's possible).

ANYWAY, it strikes me that this Pujols explanation is precisely the way people generally use defensive judgments – they use them basically to back up whatever point they intend to make. As we know, there have never been particularly trustworthy defensive statistics, and so it’s easy to pretty much whatever claim you would like to make.

For instance, a scout friend of mine called a couple of days ago and said that Manny Ramirez is an “underrated defensive outfielder.” Now, first of all, this may be true, in that MannyBeingManny is rated as “Putrid” defensively, and he’s actually “Rancid,” and “Rancid” is better than “Putrid,” so that would make him underrated. In this same way you could say that Kenny G is underrated as a musician because he’s viewed by many people as the single worst musical atrocity to hit since a meteor crashed into the earth and killed all the dinosaurs (they say the sound was a lot like the Hall & Oates comeback album). But this is patently not true. Michael Bolton is demonstrably worse than Kenny G. Also the Peter Cetera incarnation of the band Chicago. Also Starship.

Second of all, he was trying to defend Manny Ramirez as a player, and instead of saying, “OK, look, he’s a clown, he doesn’t know where he is half the time, he runs the bases like he has only a passing understanding of the rules, he chases after balls into the corner with all the enthusiasm of a janitor trying to kill a large rat in a garbage dumpster (Editor’s note: I actually saw this in the fourth grade, and it is an image I’m not likely to ever forget), but occasionally he will shock you and make a decent defensive play or throw, and man he knocks the living crap out of the ball,” he gives me this, “He’s underrated defensively” nonsense.

But that’s how it goes: People have simply used defense to cover up the shortcomings of players they like or to tear down a player they have no particular use for. It isn't necessarily that the judgments are WRONG (it is acknowledged by most of the people who saw his games that Pujols really was a bad shortstop in high school). It is just that they are overplayed or underplayed to make a point. Managers always used to say stuff like, "Well, Player X can't hit, but he will save you 100 runs every year with his defense" or "Sure, Player Y can hit a little, but he will cost you 100 runs every year on defense," or some other absurd comment.

It’s funny: Baseball is the most precisely recorded game in the history of mankind; we can tell you with some statistical clarity who the best hitters are, who the best pitchers are, how many runs players create, how many wins they help earn, how they perform compared to their peers, how they perform compared to a replacement-level player, and so on, and so on. But it's still human nature to find vacuums and delve into myths because that's where we can shout our opinions loudest. Nobody can argue with any real authority that Jason Kendall can be of any use whatsoever with the bat or with his throwing arm. But they can shout all day about how well he "handles pitchers" or how he's "a leader."

ANYWAY, tangent there, sorry, Albert Pujols is my pick right now because he makes more plays outside the usual first baseman sphere than anyone in the game. He's sort of a second baseman playing first.

Casey Kotchman is a terrific defensive first baseman as well. Kevin Youkilis gets mention since he has not made an error all year, and he's probably the best in the game right now at reliably making all the routine to slightly above routine plays.

OK, I'm going to add a bonus: Top 5, and Bottom 5 at each position for this season so far. You can thank me by clicking here:

Best defensive first basemen (in order):
1. Albert Pujols
2. Casey Kotchman
3. Todd Helton
4. Kevin Youkilis
5. Sean Casey

Worst defensive first basemen (in order)
1. Dmitri Young
2. Richie Sexson
3. Nomar Garciaparra
4. Ryan Garko
5. Ryan Howard

And I apologize to the Derrek Lee fan -- his defensive numbers are pretty brutal, and my scouts reports on him aren't any better. I'll try to watch him closely the rest of the year.