My goal in starting sabermetrics was to use measurement and logic to address basic, large-scale issues about baseball and sports. Why do teams win? What are the characteristics of a winning team? How are runs created? What elements of an offense are most important? What is the aging curve? When is a player's prime? What types of players (and what types of skills) age well? What is a player's economic value? Why do franchises succeed or fail? What is the relative importance of the draft vs. trades vs. payroll?

I know that I will be hammered for saying this and probably lose a couple of hundred followers, but it still seems to me to be true and I think I'd better say it. MLB may now be in a position where, if they don't actively encourage someone to sign Trevor Bauer, they could be setting themselves up to lose a billion-dollar lawsuit.

There are two fundamental differences between offense and defense in baseball, which cause offensive methods not to work when applied to fielding. One is that offense has a hard floor, zero runs scored, which means that every offensive achievement is an actual positive, whereas defense is unbounded; you can allow a very large number of runs in a game, which means that defensive achievements are working against a flexible base. Every putout is not an actual positive, because you are going to get 24 of them a game no matter how bad you are.