According to Ben’s breakdown of Jorge Posada’s CERA, the long-time Yankees backstop has completely forgotten how to handle a pitching staff. After residing in the mid-4s for most of his career, Posada’s CERA has jumped to 6.31 this season. This, of course, means that pitchers don’t like throwing to him and that the Yankees should DH Posada a lot more, because Posada and Cervelli is better than Posada and Matsui.

I’ll knock off the sarcasm there, though I still hold contempt for the idea that Jorge is suddenly a lot worse at handling a pitching staff than he has been in the past. Still think Jorge’s not a good catcher, based on his CERA? Give this BtB article by R.J. Anderson a quick read. He’s not even talking about Posada in this instance. Rather, he’s talking about the league-wide obsession with backup catchers.

Fans seem to fall in with reserve catchers. I don’t know why. I suspect it has to do with the mystique of being a defensive stalwart, one immeasurable by metrics known to man. Perhaps having to sit in the bullpen and warm pitchers up is something worthwhile. These guys are usually horrible hitters, the worst bats on the team that actually get paid to hit. Why? Because if they hit well, they would be playing.

So, you have a player on each team who has writers, fans, and television folk talking up his game calling abilities and whatnot because saying that his entire value comes from squatting for four hours a week isn’t something you take pride in. Eventually it melts in. People start looking for things that feed this confirmation bias of Johnny McBackstop being a human computer. It becomes mainstay knowledge, and now every team in the league needs one of these veteran catchers, good at absolutely nothing outside of history lessons.

He goes on to throw an enormous monkey wrench in the case of CERA, starting with the abstract — there are other factors like ballpark, the pitcher himself, and the defense behind him — and concluding with the concrete — Michael Barrett and Jason Varitek have comparable CERA numbers over their careers.

Jorge might not be the best game-caller. He might not handle a pitching staff the way other catchers do. Those points are up for debate. However, to use CERA in the argument does it no service. The stat simply doesn’t reflect what happens on the field.

When the Yanks’ streak of 18 consecutive games without an error ended on a Jorge Posada errant throw last night, it ended a fun little streak, but not one that tells us much of anything about the Yanks defense. You can’t make an error on a ball you can’t get to, after all. But as Peter Gammons notes, the Yanks took off when Alex Rodriguez returned not because of the extra offense, but because the pitching staff finally righted itself.

Recently, the Yankees have gone on a big-time roll and taken first place in the AL East, all after the return of Alex Rodriguez. However, the key difference hasn’t been offense, although the tandem of A-Rod and Mark Teixeira is similar to what David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez once were with Boston. With A-Rod and Teixeira in the order, the Yankees’ runs per game have only risen slightly. The Yankees’ ERA, though, has dropped by more than two runs, as CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Joba Chamberlain and Co. have come together as a power rotation.

The Yankees’ rotation is made up of hard throwers who get minimal hard contact, and put little pressure on the defense. Teixeira, the owner of two Gold Gloves, has made the infield much better, and Melky Cabrera’s defensive matrix is the best of any major league center fielder. Last year, the Yankees were near the bottom in defensive efficiency, but this year they are 13th out of 30 major league teams.

I’m not sure what defensive matrix Gammons is referring to, but UZR has Melky at a studly 13.4 in CF. When he moves over to RF, that mark improves to 24.3 and Brett Gardner adds his 19.3 UZR to the mix. Gone is Bobby Abreu and his -25.3 UZR last year and in comes Nick Swisher’s just about league average -0.3 mark. Robinson Cano has improved his UZR by 12.5 runs from last year. You don’t need any fancy stats to tell you the difference between Jason Giambi and Mark Teixeira at first, and even Derek Jeter has gone from -0.7 UZR last year to 3.0 this year, the highest total FanGraphs has for the Cap’n. As a team, the Yanks have gone from a squad with a -5.4 UZR rating last year, third worst in baseball, to a better than league average UZR at 0.4 this year, good enough for 14th in the league.

By no means are the Yankees a great defensive squad, but as Joe Girardi said, they “make the plays they’re supposed to.” They couldn’t even do that last year. Better defense means more batted balls are turned into outs. More outs means fewer pitches by the pitchers, and fewer pitches by the pitchers means fewer innings thrown by the bullpen. It’s the baseball circle of life, and it’s helped the Yanks to the best record in the American League.

When Mariano Rivera and the Yankees sealed the deal on their 5-2 victory over the Indians last night, it marked the 18th game in a row in which the Yankees had not committed an error. Over that span of games, the Yankees have gone 14-4, and the team seems to be living proof of the adage “defense wins games.”

But on its face, this errorless streak is a bit deceptive it doesn’t really tell us very much about how the Yankees have been doing in the field. It does tell us that the Yankees have been sure-handed and that the team’s pitchers can trust the other eight men on the field. It does tell us that the Yankees are fielding the balls they can get to cleanly, but it does not tell us if the Yankees are getting to more balls and thus are turning more potential hits into outs.

For that, we have to move beyond the limited statistic of errors and look at some of the new defensive metrics that assess range and defensive efficiency. Over the weekend, long-time RAB reader Jamal G. commented on the defense: “I think the huge defensive statistic that people should be paying attention to is the Yankees’ being 5th in the AL (12th in MLB) in Team Defensive Efficiency with a .697%. I expected the defense to be better, but in the 18-20 range; this is surprisingly awesome.”

I had recruited Jamal to write a longer guest column for us, but then the new Statistician Magician beat us to the punch. In his piece, he analyzes the various parts that make up the Yankee defensive whole and concludes that, while so far there are no stand-outs, the team is much improved over recent years. He concludes:

The team’s overall defense is close to average. But that is much improved based on what we all saw last season. And because of this, they don’t have a real flaw: above-average pitching, once it comes around completely; a very good offense when healthy; and now a decent enough defense too.

If they keep up the glove-work, which they should, it will be a great step in the right direction for Cashman and the rest of the organization. Because Cashman seeing their success coincide with an improvement on defense, will let him truly understand what he has been missing for some time now.

…Because defense matters.

With Derek Jeter’s new-found range, Robinson Cano’s resurgence and some excellent outfield defense after a few years of Matsui-Damon-Abreu, the Yankees are turning balls that once were hit into outs. Their starting pitchers can go deeper into games, and the team enjoys fewer opposing base runners.

Right now, it’s all clicking for the Yanks, and their defense is a large part of it. The error-less streak looks good on paper and makes for some nice headlines, but it tells only part of the story. As much as they are winning with hitting and winning with pitching, the Yankees are starting to win with fielding too, and as Flying Joba Chamberlain showed last night, it looks good.

Photo by Mark Duncan for the Associated Press.

Defensive quantification, the final frontier. Since its introduction to mainstream culture, baseball has been a sport obsessed with statistics. Yet one aspect of the game which has flustered analysts for years is defense. We’ve seen some breakthroughs over the past few years, with Zone Rating, Ultimate Zone Rating, John Dewan’s plus minus, and Dave Pinto’s PMR, but none of them provide us with the concrete information we get from batting and pitching stats. All that means is that we should be looking for other ways to accurately evaluate defensive and its effect on the outcome of games.

On Wednesday, Rob Neyer explored the first-place Texas Rangers and their improved pitching staff. A team which has ranked no better than 12 out of 14 AL teams the past four years is currently sixth best in the young season. They’ve combined that fortune, which comes mostly on the effort of Kevin Millwood and his 2.92 ERA, with 191 runs scored, two behind Boston for second most in the AL. While it might sound funny to hear “first place Texas Rangers,” it’s not so odd to hear that the team with the sixth-best pitching and third-best offense leads its division.

At FanGraphs today, Dave Cameron flips the argument a bit and gives the Rangers defense a lot of credit for the team’s pitching success. His evidence: the team’s FIP — that is, Fielding Independent Pitching, defined below — is actually worse this year, at 5.17, than it was all of last year, 4.83. This would indicate that the defense is doing quite the job in converting balls in play into outs.

We can see this from an anecdotal and a statistical standpoint. The Rangers rearranged their infield over the winter in order to eradicate a few of their weaknesses. For instance, the team featured a revolving door at third base, none of whom were any good at the position, as evidenced by their -26.7 collective UZR. At shortstop, Michael Young featured a -5.4 UZR. So the Rangers slid Young over to third, and though it hasn’t gone quite as planned there’s still time for him to make the adjustment. They replaced him with defensive whiz Elvis Andrus, who is into the positive UZR rankings already. They moved Chris Davis over to first, where his bat will play just fine and he’s less of a liability than he was at third. Even Ian Kinsler is playing better this year, projecting to a 14.4 UZR/150 after negative values in his earlier years.

The question, of course, is how much of this is related to a small sample size and how much is for real. We can’t tell yet if Kinsler is getting extremely lucky or if having Andrus up the middle is giving him a boost. We don’t know if Michael Young is bad at third — and that comes in two senses. First, is he really bad, in the sense of, is UZR accurately depicting his ability? Second, is he just bad, or is this just a transition after having played shortstop from 2004 through 2008? Perhaps the biggest question here is, how does this relate to the Yankees?

One area in which the Yanks could have really done something to improve this off-season was on defense. Signing Mark Teixeira improved the glovework at first, but what about the rest of the infield? In order to see an improvement, they’d have to see Robinson Cano return to 2007 form, Jeter maintain what he did in 2008, and for A-Rod to continue being league average. Is it working? Well, the team has a 5.18 team FIP against a 5.64 team ERA, so it doesn’t look like it. That’s not the final word, of course — comparing FIP to ERA is just a tool to aid in analysis. But, with this one readily-available tool, it doesn’t appear the Yanks defense is doing much to bail out the pitchers.

It’s tough to make any kind of far-reaching judgments when the season is barely a month over. However, in the early going it looks like the Yanks are having problems all around: with their pitching, with their defense, and with their hitting, particularly with runners in scoring position. That’s quite a stack of problems for a team to overcome. The saving grace is that the Yankees have the talent to do it. They’re currently 10th in the AL in UZR, though they’re off of 9th place by a decent margin. Still, with even a modest improvement from here on out — say, league average — they can make the necessary adjustments and play this season like we’d imagined it in March.