Joe Sheehan Says BJ Upton Will Be Baseball's Best Player in the 2nd Half

http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9242#commentMessage

Also featured? This completely fantastic rant that basically sums up what I was going to say about the article.

My point is that FanGraphs built up a body of stats that they rely solely upon to write their articles. BP used to do that, but their defensive stats are pretty low on the reliability factor at this point and their statistic page and links are almost to the point of being worthless in comparison to a site like FanGraphs. BP used to be the de facto standard, but now it seems like they're playing the respondent blogger to FanGraphs' very strong database of statistics and authors. Sheehan has been the most acutely overt in his cribbings from FanGraphs, too. BP should be working to improve their own statistical language and database, not borrowing from others unless they want to be seen as merely freeloading bloggers as opposed to the progressive statistical mavericks they started out as. All I know is that Joe Sheehan and a few other BP authors had no idea what defensive and overall run values were until FanGraphs came along. I'm happy they're realizing their oversight, but it just seems like they should be figuring this stuff out on their own instead of standing on FanGraphs' ever enlarging shoulders.

And look, I get the Sheehan type of columnist. He's the guy who gets to spout off outlandish ideas and prognostications that have very little chance of ever meaning much but really rile up the masses and occasionally get people thinking. That has its place on any major publication, and I can't fault BP for wanting Sheehan to continue. What I can fault them for is not taking defensive metrics and values and the subsequent changing landscape of the overall player valuations a lot more seriously in the past few years. BP is and has been the gold standard of mass sabermetric reading, and I want them to start ponying up for the next level of player evaluations before it's too late.

If you go to the statistics link on the BP homepage, you get categories defined as Offense, General, Pitching and Team. Nowhere on that page does it list individual defense. Nowhere does it go into detail about the most important pitching information to come along in the last few years either (i.e. PitchFX). For a website designed to analyze players statistically, that's darned near a crime. That page should have PitchFX database analysis along with a defensive database (hopefully based off of UZR or some comparable). It's time to upgrade the stats department for the site if you ask me....