In the shift towards appreciating defense, especially in the outfield, guys like Franklin Gutierrez and Nyjer Morgan have seen their stock rise. Fly-catchers are now in demand, as we return to an era where it is acceptable to have a corner outfielder who can’t hit, as long as he catches everything between the foul poles. But while everyone will focus on the finest field, what about the guys on the other end of the spectrum? There are some outfielders, in fact, who are so bad with the leather that they practically eliminate their entire offensive value.

As the transition towards defense-first outfielders takes place, we’re still left with remnants of the last decade, the softball players who can mash a baseball but can’t track one down in the outfield. Even as teams more aggressively move these players to first base or DH, there is still a group of guys who make things interesting every time the ball is hit in the air. Here are the five worst outfielders in baseball from 2007-2009, and their UZR per 150 games.

Brad Hawpe, RF, Rockies: -33.0
Manny Ramirez, LF, Dodgers: -16.0
Delmon Young, LF, Twins: -14.1
Jason Bay, LF, Mets: -13.6
Michael Cuddyer, RF, Twins: -12.4

Yes, that’s right, over the course of 150 games, Hawpe is 33 runs worse than the average rightfielder.

This fraternity of all-bat/no-glove outfielders has thinned out a bit with the move of Adam Dunn to first base and Jermaine Dye’s inability to find an employer, but these five still fly the banner for hulking sluggers in the outfield. Hawpe, Ramirez and Bay certainly hit well enough to still have value despite their misadventures in the field, but Young has actually performed below replacement-level the last few seasons, meaning his negative performance on defense has actually outweighed his offensive contributions, which have also been minimal.

Young seems to have gotten the message, dropping 30 pounds over the winter and reporting to camp in the proverbial “best shape of his life”. It will be interesting to see if it’s enough to keep the Twins pitching staff from cringing, however, as teammate Cuddyer is almost as bad. Perhaps that’s why Minnesota locked up centerfielder Denard Span to a long-term deal last week. Considering he’s flanked by Young and Cuddyer, he’s going to have to catch practically everything opponents hit to the outfield in 2010.

When the Seattle Mariners signed Chone Figgins over the winter, it was widely assumed that he would replace the departed Adrian Beltre at third base. However, when spring training opened, the team had Figgins playing second base, while last year’s second baseman Jose Lopez had moved over to third base. This move appears to be part of a growing trend in Major League Baseball.

More and more, teams are realizing that if you can play a quality third base, you probably have the skills to transition to second, and vice versa. While the traditional view has held second base as a premium defensive position (one of four “up the middle” spots that has generally been regarded as a spot for a good glove guy), modern defensive statistics such as Ultimate Zone Rating suggest that there just isn’t much of a difference between second base and third base.

A year ago, 26 players played at least 50 innings at both second base and third base, and it wasn’t just utility infielders playing part time; Alberto Callaspo, Adam Kennedy, Martin Prado, and Ian Stewart were among the everyday players who spent a decent amount of time at both second and third. As a whole, these players were one run above average at second base per 150 games played and two runs below average at third base per 150 games played. It’s a difference so small as to not be important.

Indeed, it is becoming more and more common for teams to see these positions as interchangeable. The Twins will use second baseman Nick Punto and Brendan Harris as a third base platoon, while the Cardinals signed Felipe Lopez to play both positions for their squad. The mystique of second base as a spot for glove guys and third base as the place where power hitters go is breaking down, as teams find that if you can play one, you can play the other.

When Seattle traded for Casey Kotchman on Jan. 7, the general reaction was a shrug of the shoulders. Of course the Mariners acquired a guy who is considered one of the best defensive first basemen in the league; Jack Zduriencik has shown almost as much affection for quality glove guys as he has for his wife and kids.

However, the M’s don’t just expect Kotchman to play a nice first base in his age-27 season. The coaching staff also believes it can tap into some of the offensive potential he showed earlier in his career, and as a left-handed hitter, they believe that the friendly right-field porch in Safeco Field should help him finally deliver on some of his potential power.

The park is much friendlier to left-handed bats than right-handed hitters, who suffer the most from its asymmetrical alignment. However, there’s one problem in hoping that Kotchman takes advantage of the proximity of the right field wall -– he prefers to pound the ball into the ground.

For his career, 52.7 percent of all of his balls in play have been hit on the ground. Last year, Kotchman hit the ball in the air at the same rate as guys like Scott Podsednik and Melky Cabrera. In fact, among first basemen with at least 400 plate appearances in 2009, Kotchman hit the fewest fly balls by far –- his 29.5 percent mark was nearly five percent behind Nick Johnson, the next runner-up.

If the Mariners are going to contend in 2010, they’re going to have to get offensive production from Kotchman, and he won’t be able to take advantage of how Safeco Field is configured by driving the ball into the ground. Hitting coach Ty Van Burkleo’s biggest job this spring may just be to convince Kotchman to get under the ball once in a while.

The Setup

There are a lot of things to like about Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw. His fastball averages 94 miles per hour, yet he also can make hitters look foolish with a knockout breaking ball. He struck out 185 batters in just 171 innings a year ago, posting a K/9 that was the seventh-highest of any starter in baseball. He’s left-handed in a sport that covets southpaws. Oh, and he doesn’t turn 22 years old until halfway through spring training.

Even though Kershaw still struggles with his command and lacks experience, his ERA last season was even with Roy Halladay’s, and better than Johan Santana’s and Cliff Lee’s. When a pitcher is this good and this young, it is easy to dream about what the future may hold. If he’s already one of the best pitchers in the game (in this case, he is), what will happen when you give him some time to mature, learn how to pound the strike zone, mix his pitches and study hitters’ tendencies?

Unfortunately for Kershaw and Dodgers fans, history suggests that this may be as good as it will ever get for the young lefty. In fact, given the success he has had in the majors at such a young age, he may have already peaked.

The Proof

Hitters are fairly predictable, as a group. They will show flashes of potential in their early 20s, add strength and hit a physical prime in their late 20s, and then decline in their 30s. The peak age of a position player has been shown to be around 27, with most offensive players following in this same general pattern. When you find a 21-year-old who is already a good hitter, there is a good chance greatness is in store when he gets older.

The same is not true of hurlers. They do not follow an arc-shaped career path; instead, the normal career trajectory for a starting pitcher heads downward.

There are various reasons for this observed phenomenon, the most obvious one being injury. It doesn’t take a baseball historian to rattle off the names: Mark Prior, Kerry Wood and Rich Harden are just this decade’s reminders of greatness at a young age cut short by surgery. Every pitcher, no matter how talented, is just one pitch away from the office of Dr. James Andrews on any given day.

Even putting aside the possibility of attrition, pitchers still defy conventional growth curves. While improvements are made in throwing strikes and pitching more intelligently, these marginal gains are more than offset by a bigger problem — a loss of velocity.

Scott Kazmir was the last version of Kershaw when he made his debut in the majors in 2004, throwing 94 mph at the age of 20 and racking up the strikeouts. He would develop into one of the better pitchers in the American League by age 22, but his fastball and slider began to slow down. Last year, his fastball averaged just 91.1 mph, and the Tampa Bay Rays dumped their once untouchable ace on the Los Angeles Angels in order to escape his long-term contract.

Before Kazmir, there was Oliver Perez in 2004, who broke through as a 22-year-old for the Pittsburgh Pirates. His 93-mph fastball allowed him to pile up the K’s and give Pittsburgh hope that it had an ace in the making. Two years later, with his fastball down to 91, the Pirates admitted that he wasn’t fixable and shipped him to the New York Mets.

Even the best young pitchers in the game, Felix Hernandez and Tim Lincecum, have lost 2 mph off their fastballs since arriving in the big leagues. Throwing hard is a young man’s game, and one that is very hard to sustain as the workload piles up. As young pitchers learn that they have to pace themselves to get through a six-month season, they find their radar readings less impressive than they used to be.

Unlike hitters, who tend to gain power as they age, pitchers lose it. In the past 30 years, 11 pitchers have rang up at least 180 strikeouts in a single season when they were 22 or younger. The list is not full of guys on their way to Cooperstown. Instead, it stands as a sobering reminder of just how great starts to a career can go very, very wrong. Other than Fernando Valenzuela, whose age has been the subject of much speculation, the most successful pitchers of the group: Sid Fernandez, who only three times managed to throw 200 innings in a season, and Dwight Gooden, who should have been so much more than he turned out to be. Beyond those guys, there are names such as Edwin Correa and Floyd Youmans, who were out of baseball before they could even rent a car.

The Conclusion

Some pitchers can make the necessary adjustments and have long, great careers — but most don’t. More often, the next big thing on the mound becomes a sad story of what could have been. For every Lincecum or Hernandez, there’s a Rick Ankiel, a Dontrelle Willis, a Prior or a Kazmir. Whether it’s injury, pressure, or more often a fastball that decides not to show up to spring training one year, young pitchers are often the biggest disappointments.

Kershaw is a remarkably talented pitcher, having already accomplished quite a bit in his first two years in the major leagues. His arm is golden, his upside seemingly unlimited. But the reality of history shows that he’s more likely to get worse than to get better, and fans counting on Kershaw to win a Cy Young or two are likely to be disappointed.

Put your faith in young hitters like Justin Upton or Matt Wieters, who are on a career path that should lead them to better things in the future. Pitchers like Kershaw will break your heart.

The Setup

Since Michael Lewis penned “Moneyball” in 2003, franchises have been branded either by their support or disdain for the philosophies that the book espouses. The Oakland Athletics were held up as the model organization, the team that won by ignoring the traditions of baseball and finding value in underappreciated assets — the most prominent of those at the time being slow, unathletic, career minor leaguers who draw walks to avoid making outs.

A’s GM Billy Beane was winning with teams full of players that old-school scouts had hated. From John Jaha to Matt Stairs, the A’s were the destination of choice for guys who could run about as well as the average fan in the seats. Where other teams saw a lack of bat speed, an inability to play defense and a body that would break down by age 30, Beane saw the ability to construct an offense that would score runs by stringing together a few walks and a home run.

This particular brand of baseball, dubbed the “Moneyball” style, was despised by those who had been taught that the game should be played by fielding your position well, bunting runners over and doing the little things that help your team win. But now, in an attempt to chase the current undervalued assets, the tables have turned. Teams that are using the nerd-stats approach that the A’s made popular have abandoned power-hitting oafs in favor of athletic defenders who can run like the wind.

The “Moneyball” teams are now building rosters that would fit perfectly into pre-spreadsheet baseball. Perhaps no team exemplifies this shift as well as the Boston Red Sox.

The Proof

With an Ivy League-educated general manager who hired stat maven Bill James as a consultant, the Red Sox have been one of the most visible sabermetric teams in baseball recently. They built teams around David Ortiz, J.D. Drew and Kevin Youkilis, showing that they valued the same traits the Athletics had earlier in the decade. When the Sox finally tired of Manny Ramirez’s antics, they devised a three-way trade to bring them Jason Bay, another player who fits that particular mold.

However, when GM Theo Epstein evaluated how to improve a roster that finished in second place in the AL East and lost in the first round of the playoffs in 2009, he did not conclude that the team needed more power hitters to supercharge the offense. Instead, he let Bay sign with the New York Mets and then reallocated the money to Mike Cameron and Adrian Beltre — despite the fact that the duo hit fewer home runs combined than Bay hit a year ago.

Neither Cameron nor Beltre can match Bay’s production at the plate, but they can run circles around him in the field. Defense is where Epstein saw an opportunity to improve in the most cost-efficient way, so out went the burly slugger with bad range and in came a couple of average hitters whose stardom is measured in Web Gems.

Epstein and James have traded on-base percentage for ultimate zone ratings, believing that the market has over-corrected and is now undervaluing a player’s ability to save runs in the field. They aren’t the only ones — the Tampa Bay Rays, Seattle Mariners, and yes, even Billy Beane’s Oakland Athletics are also on the bandwagon.

The results of this shift toward run prevention? The “Moneyball” teams are targeting the type of fast, athletic, fundamentally sound players that scouts have been drooling over for years. Tampa Bay, Oakland and Boston were all in the top five in stolen bases among American League clubs in 2009. Seattle finished eighth and then outbid everyone else in the league for speed-and-defense specialist Chone Figgins this winter. The Mariners also led the league in sacrifice bunts, and that doesn’t figure to change now that Figgins has joined the club and the team replaced power-hitting first baseman Russell Branyan with glove-man Casey Kotchman.

Likewise, the A’s should feature a mostly small-ball offense, especially with the addition of Coco Crisp to an outfield that already featured Rajai Davis and Ryan Sweeney. Beane now believes that having three center fielders tracking down every fly ball hit will make up for the fact that his three starting outfielders combined to hit 12 home runs in 2009.

The Conclusion

The age of the Giambi brothers is over. Sure, these teams would still love to have a middle-of-the-order thumper who can get on base and hit the ball 500 feet with regularity, but they aren’t going to pay the market price for power when similar value comes at a discount in another package. The value purchase now is to re-create the 1985 St. Louis Cardinals, a tremendous defensive team led by speed merchants who ran their way into the World Series despite a glaring lack of home run hitters.

Whitey Herzog, who managed that Cardinals team, would never be mistaken for a “Moneyball” disciple. But if Herzog were still putting together rosters in 2010, the teams that would most resemble what he would want are the teams that use statistical analysis to help inform their decisions. What was old is new again, and 2010 will be the year that the scouts and statheads finally come to an agreement on how a team should be built.

At 6-foot-10, Randy Johnson always has stood above the crowd. He doesn’t stand out just because of his height, though. When we line up all the left-handed pitchers the game has seen, Johnson is the first one we notice. His career is unmatched by that of any other left-hander, and he is the most dominant lefty ever to take the mound.

The career strikeout leaderboard for left-handed pitchers drives this point home. Johnson is the leader (and second among all pitchers behind right-hander Nolan Ryan) with 4,875 strikeouts. Steve Carlton is second, trailing Johnson by 739 punchouts despite pitching nearly 1,100 more innings than the Big Unit. In third place stands Mickey Lolich with 2,832 strikeouts, a mere 58 percent of Johnson’s career total.

There isn’t another MLB category in which one guy stands so far above his peers. Baseball has literally never seen anything like Johnson, a power left-hander who blew hitters away and single-handedly won games for his team. There had been some great left-handers before him, but none matched his dominance.

Carlton is within shouting distance of Johnson in career strikeouts only because of the number of innings he pitched. He never averaged more than a strikeout per inning in any season and led the league in K/9 only twice in his 24 seasons of big league action. Johnson, on the other hand, led the league in K/9 on nine different occasions and has the highest career strikeout rate per nine innings (10.61) of any starting pitcher in baseball history.

Sandy Koufax won’t show up on many career leaderboards because arthritis abbreviated his career, but he certainly had a great run of dominance from 1962 to 1966. In that five-year span, Koufax won 111 games, had an ERA 67 percent better than league average, struck out 9.4 batters per nine innings and won three Cy Young Awards.

If we are going to focus on Koufax’s best five years, though, we also must look at the best five-year run that Johnson had. From 1998 to 2002, the big man won 100 games, had an ERA 75 percent better than league average and struck out 12.3 batters per nine innings while winning four Cy Young Awards. Johnson’s peak was just as high as Koufax’s, but he had 22 years of longevity as well.

Warren Spahn, great as he was, was never the dominant force that Johnson was. He simply compiled tremendous career statistics through endurance, throwing 5,243 innings over 21 seasons. His career 3.09 ERA is nice, but only 18 percent better than the league average given the era in which he pitched. He had two legitimately tremendous seasons (1947 and 1953), but was more often just a good, healthy starting pitcher. Longevity is terrific, but it isn’t dominance. Spahn can’t hold a candle to Johnson’s peak.

Lefty Grove’s career is generally held up as the pinnacle by which all left-handers have been measured. With 300 wins and a career ERA that’s 48 percent better than league average, he’s certainly in the discussion for the best lefty of all time, but Grove got a lot of help from his defenders. He averaged just 5.2 strikeouts per nine innings for his career — above-average for the time, but not historically great.

Johnson dominated at a time when even flimsy middle infielders were driving balls out of the park with regularity, and he did it by sending them back to the dugout shaking their heads. The Big Unit stands alone as the best left-handed pitcher the game has seen.

Albert Pujols’ greatness is unquestioned. He won his second consecutive National League MVP award this year (his third overall), and this time around, he took home every first-place vote. He’s finished in the top four in MVP voting in eight of the nine years he’s been in the majors, and he hasn’t even turned 30. Yet there is another National League player who is just as valuable, if not more so, and receives none of the accolades. Seriously.

Chase Utley, the Phillies’ star second baseman, has never finished higher than seventh in the MVP voting since he arrived in Philadelphia, but has contributed more bang for the buck than any other player in baseball. At FanGraphs, we have a metric that encompasses a player’s total contribution on the field, called Wins Above Replacement. WAR, as it is often abbreviated, combines a player’s value at the plate and in the field to give a better overall picture of a player’s worth. (In layman’s terms, “replacement,” as defined by stat guru Tom Tango, represents “the talent level for which you would pay the minimum salary on the open market, or for which you can obtain at minimal cost in a trade.” Mike Sweeney, who signed a minor league deal in early 2009 and produced 0.2 WAR for the Mariners, is a good example of a replacement-level player.)

By putting all players against a similar baseline, we can compare their value side by side, pitting defensive wizards against burly sluggers and finding out who actually contributes more to helping their team win. Since entering the league in 2005, Utley has added 37.9 wins above what a league minimum player would have provided, which is a tremendous total that represents his offensive prowess and Gold Glove skills at second base. Middle infielders who can hit as well as Utley are rare breeds indeed, and when you factor in his incredible baserunning — 23-for-23 in stolen bases last year! — he grades out as the most complete player in baseball. From that Wins Above Replacement total, we can use a wins-to-dollars conversion based on how teams have historically valued wins in the free-agent market on a yearly basis. Considering how good Utley has been since the Phillies gave him the second-base job, his performance on the field has been worth $154 million. That’s about $31 million a year in production.

Top Value Since 2005

Player	        WAR	Value	Salary	Net
Chase Utley	37.9	$154M	$25M	$129M
David Wright	29.6	$119M	$14M	$105M
Hanley Ramirez	24.9	$106M	$7M	$99M
Grady Sizemore	27.3	$108M	$10M	$98M
Albert Pujols	40.4	$164M	$66M	$98M

In exchange for that performance, the Phillies have paid Utley a meager $25 million in salary, leaving $129 million in surplus value. Pujols has been ever so slightly better on the field, producing 40.4 wins and $164 million in raw value, but St. Louis has paid him $66 million over the past five years. The $41 million difference in salary more than outweighs the 2.5 difference in wins produced on the field, allowing the Phillies to extract more value from Utley than St. Louis got from its superstar. And remember, Utley didn’t land a permanent job in the majors until 2005. He has had 2,269 fewer plate appearances to work with, and still managed to get himself within shouting distance of Pujols’ value for the decade. Once you adjust for games played, in fact, Utley grades out slightly higher. Utley has produced a net value of just over $35,000 per plate appearance, compared to $28,000 per trip to the plate for Pujols. While Utley hasn’t been at the top of the game for quite as long, once you account for salary, he’s been the most valuable player in baseball since his arrival in the big leagues.

The difference may only grow over the next few seasons. Pujols has two years remaining on the seven-year, $100 million contract he signed in 2004, but you have to believe that the Cardinals will give him a massive extension before his contract expires. He is due $16 million in each of the next two years, and the average annual salary of his next deal will surely exceed that. Utley, meanwhile, is under contract through 2013 at $15 million per year — less than half of what he’s worth on an annual basis. He may not have the trophies or the gaudy home run totals of players like Pujols or Alex Rodriguez, but Chase Utley is right there with the very best players in the game. When you factor in that the Phillies have him under contract at rates that don’t even come close to his true value, he rises above the rest as the real Most Valuable Player in baseball.