Elimination of Defense in Scoring?

[rcankosy]

Get rid of them.  Taking everything in totality, they're a larger negative than a positive.

[Canada8999]

Sometimes the easiest path isn't the right path. I have come to know Franchise GM as a league that prides itself on being the most realistic league out there. I believe with the removal of defensive stats, we would take a step back. Defense is a REAL thing, Bobby Cox has to worry about it everyday just like everyone else involved with baseball. I know some owners along with me have made some moneyball trades that didn't necessarily land us a big name player, but anaverage player who played solid offensive and defensive. These players are valuable to Major League Clubs and Franchise GM has done a good job at making them valuable in the league. I feel that it would be unfair to move such a drastic ruling so quickly when in the past we have allowed a season to adjust before implementing.

~MTK

I second this - changing the scoring rules should not be taken lightly as it controls the value of a player / every decision made.  We should explore the options of making them better before completely trashing the idea.

[guak2005]

I have to agree as well that taking out defense would rather hurt this league. Besides it would be unfair to all those managers who built their teams around solid defenses. By the way, a change of this magnitude should be backed by an overwhelming majority of managers and not just by simple majority.

[h4cheng]

For those opposed to getting rid of defense, I pose the following questions:

How are assists and errors meaningful measurements of a player's defensive ability?
-Assists and errors don't take into account the range of field a player covers.
-Outfield assists are a very rare occurrence, there is a lot of luck and randomness involved.
-There is a lot of bias with how errors are assigned to players
If assits and errors are not meaningful, it doesn't really matter how position eligibility thresholds are changed, we are still using non-realistic stats.

Is there another stat that could be used to measure defensive value?
UZR? Highly volatile IMO.

Did you REALLY build your team on defense?
There is so much randomness involved with assists (especially in the outfield), I highly doubt getting rid of defense stats will set your team back.

[Colby]

I have to agree as well that taking out defense would rather hurt this league. Besides it would be unfair to all those managers who built their teams around solid defenses. By the way, a change of this magnitude should be backed by an overwhelming majority of managers and not just by simple majority.

A 2/3 majority is necessary to pass a decision.  Every GM has a vote... your statements will help me determine if a majority rule should be passed. 

[guak2005]

The best solution would be to tweak the way we are scoring defense. I agree that OF's assists are a mostly random statistic, even considering that OFs with better arm strength tend to have the most assists. Maybe we can eliminate OF assists to solve the issue, but errors and infielder assists, while not the most accurate method, actually do represent to some level a player's defensive progress. Just like POs represent an OF's and 1B's quality fielding to some level. The more range in the OF that you cover the more PO's you'll have, for example. You can see Franklin Gutierrez and Casey Kotchman's stats to support this point. Besides, the total impact defense has on scoring is not too big and the Jamey Carroll issue can be easily corrected by taking simple measures.

[OriolesGirl]

The defensive scoring system is rather erratic to me.  As others pointed out, it has caused lineup setting issues and weird effects like that of Jamey Carroll.

[Colby]

I second this - changing the scoring rules should not be taken lightly as it controls the value of a player / every decision made.  We should explore the options of making them better before completely trashing the idea.

I agree with Ben and a couple others about implementing this radical change for 2012.  Defense is about 1/6 of our scoring system.  Is there anything that we can do to fairly fix it for 2011?  I will bring up another poll about innings/games played/games started requirements for players to obtain position eligibility.  IMO, this is something that can be implemented for 2011.

[bridgestone]

The lineup problems have been a big issue for me.  If defense is the culprit then can we agree to replace it somehow and not have position dependent stats?

[Bronx Bombers]

The lineup problems were a huge pain.