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4/11/19; edited 2/16/2025 Dee-fense, Dee-fense…Part IDo any of you know who Bill McKechnie was? He’s in the Hall of Fame, but I think he’s one of Cooperstown’s lesser-known honorees. Manager in the 20’s/30’s/40’s, very successful, but bounced around a lot and never stuck with any one team for all that long. Won pennants with the Pirates, Cardinals, and Reds, also managed the Braves. Won World Championships with the Pirates and Reds. It would be an understatement to say that Bill McKechnie was a “defense first” manager. He was more of a defense first, second, and third-through-ninth manager. When Bill McKechnie took over a team he would immediately start making whatever moves were necessary to ensure that he had the best possible defensive alignment available to him. Anyone who wasn’t an excellent defender at his position was moved to a less demanding position; if there was no suitable position for him, McKechnie would trade him. McKechnie’s teams didn’t always score a lot of runs, but they usually gave up fewer, and as a result of this, they won. McKechnie got great performances out of his pitchers because he didn’t make them do all the work. Throw strikes, and the defense will take care of the rest. Usually managing teams that weren’t very good before he took over, he had a .524 career winning percentage, always building around players who could catch and throw. I’ve been laser-focused on fielding ever since I started playing OOTP, and it’s worked very well for me. One of the advantages to using the Bill McKechnie approach in an OOTP league is that most of your opponents won’t be paying much attention to defense, and this will cause them to overvalue players who are poor defensively, and to undervalue players who are good defensively. This can be very beneficial in a draft, in free agency, or in trades. Being mindful of the role defense can play in winning allows you to see value in an area where many of your opponents won’t see it. OOTP gives us useful defensive statistics like Zone Rating and Defensive Efficiency (see Part III), but in my experience most GMs completely ignore them. They look at “pitching” statistics and think they are entirely a function of how good or bad their pitching is. In truth, runs allowed and hits allowed aren’t strictly pitching stats, they’re defensive stats. Defense is pitching plus fielding. Good fielders turn hits into outs, and poor fielders turn outs into hits. You can’t see this in the box score, so it’s easy to ignore it or pretend it’s not happening. Big mistake. I don’t want mislead anybody; McKechnie wasn’t ambivalent about offense, he just placed less importance on it than most managers do. Good baseball teams usually do a number of things well. Balance is preferable to overemphasizing any one area. If your pitching is lousy a good defense can’t make it look like it isn’t. If you can’t score runs you’re going to have problems. But if you’ve put together what you thought was a good pitching staff, and your pitchers seem to give up a lot more runs than you think they should, it’s probably not their fault. If you’re a good, conscientious GM, you’re probably always looking for ways to improve your offense and pitching. Don’t stop there; look for ways to improve your defense, too. Bill McKechnie got into the Hall of Fame by doing that. |