The Centralizing Impulse

Michael Barone has an excellent essay on what the partial dissent in Wal-Mart v Dukes says about how businesses should be run. As someone who practices a lot of class action defense, my main interest in the case* was the procedural aspects, including the point on which the Court was unanimous: you can’t use Rule 23(b)(2)’s mandatory, no-opt-out class action device and “Trial by Formula” for suits seeking individual damages. But Barone focuses on the real fissure that led to the 5-4 split on whether the case presented common, class-wide issues – the fact that Wal-Mart delegates discretion over personnel decisions down to the local store level and holds managers accountable simply for results – and how the dissent’s approach would spell the end of that entire management style. This feeds into one of Barone’s larger points: so much of “progressivism” is, for all its emotional hostility to big business, fundamentally dependent on an economy and society in which decisions are made on a nationwide basis by large, centralized institutions like big corporations, the federal government and large labor unions. Defined-benefit pension plans, nationwide class actions, a massively complex corporate tax code, volumes upon volumes of federal regulations – all these things are spectacularly ill-suited to addressing a decentralized world in which even people connected to large institutions are genuinely empowered at the local level, to say nothing of their poor fit with smaller businesses that lack the economies of scale to cope with byzantine federal regulatory demands, rent-seeking plaintiffs lawyers and long-term pension and health care costs for current employees.

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Where Do I Sign?

Expecting consistency from left-wing political activists is folly, but rarely does one get such a glaring example as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on presidential “signing statements.” Watch, and your head will spin.
During the Bush years, liberal commentators suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the longstanding practice of “signing statements” by which the President offered his own interpretation of legislation he was signing, in some cases declaring his intention to ignore unconstitutional provisions. Now, in a better world, presidents would just veto laws containing unconstitutional things – this was, in fact, perhaps the most frequent basis on which presidents used the veto power in the 19th Century – but the use of signing statements to set forth a public defense of Executive Branch prerogatives has a long and bipartisan history, and there is a quite respectable argument that such statements preserve the President’s role as head of a co-equal branch of government with as much right to his interpretation of the Constitution as Congress or the Supreme Court.
Anyway, Steve Benen was one of the liberal bloggers who pushed the anti-signing-statements hysteria without consideration that there was any argument for defending the practice whatsoever:

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RIP Big Man

BigMan.jpg
RIP Clarence Clemons. Bruce will undoubtedly tour again, but it really is an end of an era, the end of a whole, long period of my life and the lives of so many other fans of the E Street Band, to think we’ll never see the Big Man on stage again.
UPDATE: Read Joe Posnanski on Clarence. Just do.
I offered up some video memories here. A few more below the fold.

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Militarizing America: The Nick Kristof Plan

So often, the problem with the New York Times op-ed page is not just the left-leaning politics, but the poor quality of the contributors, despite the fact that they occupy some of the highest-paid and most-visible perches in the punditocracy. And the hallmark of poor quality punditry is the failure to think through the implications of one’s arguments. So it is with today’s column from Times columnist Nick Kristof.
Kristof’s thesis is that the US military is actually a “socialist” institution that should be a model for our society:

[I]f we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

Now, it’s reasonable as far as it goes to point out that the military, being wholly-owned and operated by the government, does not behave like a private for-profit enterprise. But does Kristof really think the military isn’t too bureaucratic and inefficient to be a model for the private sector? Hint: it is, because it’s a government bureaucracy, but we tolerate that because it performs an essential and irreplaceable function. Even leaving that aside, however, let’s look at the essential characteristics of the military as a workplace, few of which Kristof seems to have thought through and many of which, I’d guess, he would find objectionable as applied to the private sector:

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The Last To Know

The president jokes – and not for the first time – about “shovel-ready” projects in the stimulus not being actually shovel-ready. It’s staggering how little attention you have to have paid to American government before 2009 to be surprised by this.
Obama’s inexperience has proven to be awfully expensive. Next time, let’s not elect a guy whose first order of business is to spend nearly a trillion dollars on something with no idea how it works. That would be a good start.

BASKETBALL: The Promised Land

After all the LeBron James hype, the NBA title goes to the Dallas Mavericks. This is good news all around.
Starting with the champs – with the Rangers coming up short in October and the Cowboys long removed from their halcyon years, Dallas fans haven’t had a title to celebrate since the Dallas Stars in 1999, and Dallas is – to put it mildly – not predominantly a hockey town. The Mavericks have had many good teams over the years, but this is the first time over the hump for the franchise and its long-suffering fans, for Mark Cuban, for Dirk Nowitzki, for Jason Kidd. Even if you don’t love some of those guys – it’s been hard to root for Kidd since he pleaded guilty to domestic abuse a decade ago – they’ve paid their dues in the NBA.
As for the Heat, I may be alone in this view, but as I wrote in July, I want them to succeed and prove the naysayers wrong, in part because it pains me to see a talent as great as LeBron James get run down for not winning a title, and in part because I’ve overdosed on the preening of the LeBron bashers – but at the same time, I’m happy that he melted down and failed to win it this year. A little humility, a little adversity along the way is not just good for the soul, it’s good for the sport. A great many of the NBA’s legends (like Nowitzki and Kidd) failed in their first crack at the Finals, and sometimes multiple times, before getting over that hump – Shaq, Wilt, Olajuwon, Drexler, Dr. J, Moses, Jerry West, Isiah, Wes Useld, Elvin Hayes, Bob Pettit. LeBron, of course, has now been down this road twice. It will make it all that sweeter, and feel more earned, when and if he finally wins the big one.

The Big Man

Terrible news:

Clarence Clemons, hospitalized in Florida after a stroke, has had two brain surgeries but is “responsive and in stable condition,” according the authoritative Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band fan website, backstreets.com.
Also, Carolyn Gusoff of Fox 5 News has reported that Clemons is paralyzed on the left side of his body, though backstreets.com quotes a “close friend” of Clemons as saying: “He was paralyzed on his left side, but now he’s squeezing with his left hand.”

Prayers and best wishes for the Big Man, one of rock’s greatest performers in his own right. I could offer you a thousand words on his impact on Bruce Springsteen’s music as well as his other projects, but instead, here’s a collection of great memories on video:

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BUSINESS/OTHER Grantland on the National

If you haven’t yet checked out Bill Simmons’ new ESPN-backed website Grantland.com, you should. The site has taken its share of mockery, partly due to the hazing that comes with new, risky ideas, partly because Bill’s success (a recent NY Times profile labelled him ” the most prominent sportswriter in America”) has spawned a natural backlash, partly because of the eccentric decision by ESPN brass to name the site after long-dead 1920s sportswriting icon Grantland Rice. The site is mainly geared towards long-form sportswriting, and of course it makes me nostalgic for the days when Bill was running his own small, scrappy regional site back in Boston, where I was one of the very few regular contributors.
Anyway, it is fitting that one of Grantland’s inaugural features is a two-part oral history/remembrance (here and here) of The National, America’s first and only national daily sports newspaper, which ran from 1990-91. The profile is chock full of hilarious detail, lovingly remembered by the many talented writers who worked there – it’s worth the read just for the vicious potshots taken by the interviewees at Mike Lupica, who used The National as one of his many platforms but, unlike most of the others, didn’t commit his heart and soul to the project. You can tell reading it that most of the people involved felt, and still feel, that The National was the most exciting thing they’d ever be involved with. The tale of its rise and fall, complete with extravagant spending, a fantastic product, and a complete failure of practical business planning, strongly foreshadowed the dot-com mania that arose later in the decade, although ironically it was the technology of the late 90s that the paper most desperately needed and lacked. But as the retrospective points out, the paper may not have been a success, but it had influence on the sports-media world that persists to this day.
I remember fondly reading The National, on those occasions when I could lay hands on it and it had timely boxscores, always a dicey proposition. Some context on the times, and on why I confess I didn’t myself read The National as often as I’d have liked: we think today of the college years as a time when young people are deluged with access to the Information Age, but in 1990-91 I was in my sophmore-junior years in college in the days before the Internet; I didn’t own a television until my third year of law school, I could only sporadically get WFAN, I couldn’t afford a daily newspaper (as often as not I went to the library to read the papers)…and at the time, I was writing a weekly political op-ed column for the campus newspaper, the lead sports columnist job being filled by Bill Simmons. When I went to spend a semester in DC in the spring of 1992, I actually had to put a 3.5″ floppy disk in the mail every week to publish my column. When I started writing again for Bill’s site in 2000, it was a revelation to be able to email him a column and have it posted the next day. Now, of course, anything but instantaneous publication seems archaic.
Anyway, set aside some reading time – it’s a long profile but worth the read.

The Perils of Complexity

As a practicing lawyer, I naturally have a professional interest in vague and/or complex legal rules that require lots of expensive legal research, training and experience to understand and explain. But complexity isn’t just costly to consumers of legal services, and thus a burden on business as well as on citizen access to the courts. It’s also a drag on the economy and on personal liberty, as businesses and ordinary citizens must choose between paying lots of compliance lawyers or steering too wide of increasingly large gray areas. It risks in particular the unfair, arbitrary and sometimes corrupt or discriminatory abuse of the criminal justice system to prosecute things that were hard to foresee as violations of the law. And it demeans democracy, as the actual making of law is done by judges and bureaucrats rather than citizen-elected legislators.
One of the greatest virtues of Justice Scalia in his quarter-century on the Supreme Court (he celebrates 25 years on the High Court in September) has been his structural critique of, and systemic assault on, unnecessary legal complexity. In three opinions this morning, he focused attention on three different aspects of that same problem – one of which was graphically illustrated by yesterday’s news regarding the widespread practice of waivers under Obamacare. And last week’s news regarding the indictment of John Edwards illustrates how the failure to heed Scalia’s wise observations has made a hash of efforts by campaign finance “reformers” to regulate political speech in the United States.

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Citi Field Detailed Home/Road Splits

SNY’s Ted Berg asked this question on Twitter, and it seemed worthy of a detailed response: “Is there any hard evidence that Citi Field plays as an extreme pitcher’s park?”
Well, using the same method as in my “History of Defense” breakdowns, I combined the batting stats for all Mets games 2009-11 thru Sunday’s action, both by and against the Mets. Here’s the home/road splits:
Runs per game:
Home: 8.18
Road: 8.82
Batting Average on Balls in Play:
Home: .311
Road: .322
Doubles per 600 at bats:
Home: 38.72
Road: 41.25
Triples per 600 at bats:
Home: 5.68
Road: 4.21
Home Runs per 600 at bats:
Home: 16.93
Road: 19.41
Walks per 660 plate appearances (I used a PA metric rather than at bats for walks and strikeouts):
Home: 59.10
Road: 57.49
Strikeouts per 660 plate appearances:
Home: 113.53
Road: 110.81
Conclusion: From 2009-11, which now seems a large enough sample size to judge, Citi Field has played as a fairly extreme pitchers’ park, drastically reducing scoring and home runs, depressing batting averages on balls in play, and slightly decreasing doubles and increasing strikeouts. It is, however, a great triples park, undoubtedly due to its spacious power alleys (and a few Mets hitters well-suited to exploit them), and has seen walks increase slightly at home.
UPDATE: So, if the Mets are looking down the road to what kinds of hitters prosper at Citi Field, who should they be looking at? Here’s the 2009-11 home/road splits of Mets hitters with at least 200 plate appearances at Citi Field – home line on the left, road line on the right, and home OPS divided by road OPS in the H/R column:

Player AB BA OBA Slug% AB BA OBA Slug% H/R
Jose Reyes 494 0.324 0.378 0.506 459 0.266 0.305 0.375 1.300
Jason Bay 229 0.266 0.357 0.424 253 0.229 0.317 0.324 1.218
Luis Castillo 364 0.313 0.402 0.354 369 0.247 0.337 0.285 1.215
Angel Pagan 544 0.314 0.354 0.478 487 0.261 0.321 0.382 1.183
Daniel Murphy 347 0.303 0.341 0.470 339 0.251 0.313 0.386 1.160
Fernando Tatis 194 0.284 0.358 0.443 211 0.251 0.294 0.403 1.149
Ike Davis 317 0.271 0.366 0.470 335 0.272 0.348 0.451 1.046
David Wright 598 0.288 0.382 0.472 670 0.285 0.353 0.464 1.045
Josh Thole 208 0.269 0.335 0.356 184 0.266 0.344 0.326 1.031
Alex Cora 215 0.228 0.305 0.274 225 0.240 0.293 0.320 0.945
Jeff Francoeur 338 0.254 0.294 0.414 352 0.281 0.327 0.432 0.933
Carlos Beltran 350 0.294 0.363 0.466 379 0.290 0.394 0.501 0.926

I admit it’s odd to see Bay (and Tatis) that high, but otherwise it’s the people you’d expect: line-drive/gap hitters like Reyes, Castillo, Pagan and Murphy at the top, Beltran at the bottom (Wright hasn’t suffered at Citi nearly as much as Beltran). Reyes this season is batting .395/.453/.645 with 10 triples in 29 games at home, .277/.315/.361 with zero triples on the road.
So, if the Mets go to the free agent market in 2011, they should be looking to sign a player as much like Jose Reyes as possible. Gee, if only such a player was going to be a free agent after this season…

A History of Team Defense (Part I of II)

Part II here.
Who are the best defensive teams of all time? Individual defensive statistics in baseball – as in other team sports – have been crudely kept and poorly understood for years, with the more sophisticated modern methods only being gathered for the past decade or two. As a result, even statistically-oriented baseball fans have tended to answer questions about defense as much by reputation and anecdote as anything. The lack of a statistical framework tends to make defense a bit invisible in our memories; even most knowledgeable fans have no more concrete sense of, say, Ty Cobb as a defensive player than they do of Turkey Stearnes as a hitter. My goal in this essay is to a little bit to remedy that on the team level.
We do have one measurement of team defense that endures over time and thus can be used as a baseline for measuring team defense: Defensive Efficiency Rating (DER). I’d like to walk you through the history of the best and worst teams in each league, and the league average, in DER from the dawn of organized league ball in 1871 down to this season. As usual, I’ll try to explain here what I’m measuring in terms that make sense to readers who may not be all that familiar with the ‘sabermetric’ literature, although I make no claim to be current myself on every study out there, and welcome comments pointing to additional studies.
What is DER?
DER is, put simply, the percentage of balls in play against a team that are turned into outs. The exact formulas used to compute DER can vary a bit, and while Baseball-Reference.com – which I used for this study – computes DERs all the way back to the start of organized baseball in 1871, its description of the formula is a bit vague:

Percentage of balls in play converted into outs
This is an estimate based on team defensive and pitching stats.
We utilize two estimates of plays made.
One using innings pitched, strikeouts, double plays and outfield assists.
And the other with batters faced, strikeouts, hits allowed, walks allowed, hbp, and .71*errors committed (avg percent of errors that result in an ROE)
Total plays available are plays made + hits allowed – home runs + error committed estimate.

All methods for computing DER look at the percentage of balls in play that become hits; it appears that Baseball-Reference.com’s formula also counts the outs that result from double plays or outfield assists, both clear examples of outs created by good defense, as well as counting against the defense the one thing that fielding percentages always recorded – errors – but only where they put a man on base. From what I can tell, essentially the same formula is used over all of the site’s historical DER data, so the data is generally consistent over time.
It’s worth recalling that DER only measures outs vs. men reaching base – it doesn’t deal with extra bases on doubles and triples, or stolen bases and caught stealing, or other baserunning issues. So, it’s only one part of the picture just as on base percentage is just one part of the offensive picture. But like OBP, it’s the single most important part.
What Goes Into Team DER?
One of Bill James’ maxims throughout the 1980s was that “much of what we perceive to be pitching is in fact defense.” As most of my readers will recall, Voros McCracken broke major ground in the field of baseball analysis of pitching and defense in 2001 with a study showing that Major League pitchers, over time, had no effect – or at least, there was no difference among Major League pitchers in the effect they had – on whether balls in play become outs. Strikeouts, walks and home runs (the so-called “Three True Outcomes”) are the pitcher vs. the hitter, mano a mano, but on average, BABIP (batting average on balls in play, the flip side of DER) shows no tendency to be consistent year to year among individual pitchers; other statistical indicators also strongly suggest that a pitcher’s BABIP tends to be mostly a combination of team defense and luck. The simple way of expressing McCracken’s insight is that it’s the defense rather than the pitcher that determines how many balls in play become outs.
As with most groundbreaking insights, further research has added some caveats to McCracken’s theory. The first one, which he observed from the beginning, was that knuckleballers tend as a group to have lower than average BABIP, and thus are something of an exception to the rule. I haven’t absorbed all the further studies, but there are reasons to suspect that other classes of pitchers may have a modest advantage in the battle against BABIP, including elite relievers (Troy Percival, Armando Benitez, Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman and Keith Foulke all seemed to have much lower career BABIP than their circumstances would suggest) and possibly pitchers who throw a huge number of breaking balls (we’ll discuss Andy Messersmith a bit below).
Also, McCracken’s research, and most of the following research, looked at the conditions of modern baseball (at the time, Retrosheet and Baseball Prospectus’ database only went back to the mid-1950s). It’s entirely possible that pitchers had greater influence on BABIP/DER in the era before 1920, or further back, when there were pitchers who had consistent success even in the era when most plate appearances resulted in a ball in play and thus the pitcher had little opportunity to set himself apart from his peers by success in the Three True Outcomes. As I explained in this 2001 essay, the playing conditions were greatly different in 19th century baseball in particular, and I’d be hesitant without data on that era to just assume that the pitcher’s effect on balls in play was as minimal then as it is now.
Finally, of course, as with other statistical measures, there are park effects. We all know that different parks are more or less favorable for hitters, and of the components of that, park effects on home runs are significant, and parks can effect walks and strikeouts as well. (Less so for baserunning, in most cases). Balls in play are no exception, and I don’t have data handy on how park effects specifically affect balls in play over time besides the ability to notice some trends (for example, the Polo Grounds for many years was a great home run park but not a great hitters’ park; I assume DER there tended to be high) and a few specific examples where I dug into the numbers we have. So bear in mind that the numbers set out below are not park-adjusted.
Key to the Charts
BIP%: Percentage of plate appearances resulting in a ball in play (i.e.,Plate Appearances minus homers, walks and strikeouts). Since I used league batting rather than pitching data for this, there may be a slight discrepancy for the period since the start of interleague play in 1997.
NL/AL etc.: Under the league name I have the league’s DER for that season.
High/Low: The team with the league’s highest and lowest DERs. I used Baseball-Reference.com’s team abbreviations.
DER: That team’s DER
High%/Low%: Team DER divided by the league average. This is the key number I use to identify the best and worst defensive teams, so we can see who were the best and worst defensive teams relative to the league average. As usual, I’m not using any math here more complicated than simple arithmetic and basic algebra.
Also, where I compute “rough” estimates of BABIP for pre-1950 pitchers I used the basic formula of (H-HR)/((IP*3)+H-HR-K)
The 1870s
Talent levels in the 1870s were especially uneven, as the first organized league – the National Association – began play in 1871 just two years after the debut of the first-ever professional team. Schedules were short (20 games in 1871, in the 60s by decade’s end), fielders didn’t wear gloves, playing surfaces were ungroomed and in some cases effectively without fences, and with nine balls for a walk and longballs unheard of, nearly every plate appearance resulted in a ball in play – the 1872 season’s 96.5% rate is the highest in the game’s history, and 1879 was the last season above 90%.
As you can see, defenses improved dramatically over this period, in part no doubt as professional pitchers and fielders learned their craft and more of the nation’s best ballplayers gathered into the National Association and later the NL. But errors were a big chunk of the poor defense of the era – in each of the NL’s first five seasons, there were more unearned runs than earned runs scored, and it wasn’t until 1906 that the average number of unearned runs would drop below 1 per game.
The most successful defensive team of the era was the 1876 St. Louis “Brown Stockings” team (not precisely the same organization as the Cardinals), the only Major League team ever to be 10% better than its league in DER. Starting pitcher George “Grin” Bradley struck out 1.6 men per 9 innings but led the league with a 1.23 ERA (the team also allowed the league’s fewest runs, although their 2.36 unearned runs per 9 innings was only third-best in the league) while throwing all but four of the team’s innings. A rough estimate of the BABIP against Bradley is .258 in 1875, .224 in 1876, but .285 after he changed teams the next year, when his ERA nearly tripled, and .267 for his career. Which at least seems consistent with the notion that Bradley’s defense was doing most of the work.
Note that the Philadelphia Athletics of 1873-74, featuring Cap Anson and Ezra Sutton in their infield, made the only repeat appearance on the decade’s leaderboard (Anson, in his early 20s, played multiple positions including short and third, while Sutton was beginning a long career as a third baseman and shortstop).
The worst defensive team of all time? I hate to give you such an underwhelming answer, but by a wide margin it’s the 1873 Baltimore Marylands, who folded after just 6 winless games and almost none of whose players appeared in the big leagues again. The hapless Marylands allowed 144 runs in 6 games (24 per game), only 48 of which were earned; in addition to hideous defense their pitchers didn’t strike out a single batter. (The offense was no better, as a team batting average of .156 with only one extra base hit and no walks attest). When you think of the level of competition in those early years, think of the Marylands.
National Association-National League

BIP% NA High DER High % Low DER Low %
1871 94.5% 586 NYU 608 103.75% TRO 548 93.52%
1872 96.5% 589 BOS 647 109.85% OLY 510 86.59%
1873 96.2% 578 ATH 613 106.06% MAR 458 79.24%
1874 96.7% 589 ATH 629 106.79% BAL 552 93.72%
1875 96.4% 619 HAR 663 107.11% WAS 538 86.91%
BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1876 95.3% 626 STL 698 111.50% CIN 569 90.89%
1877 92.2% 623 HAR 642 103.05% CIN 561 90.05%
1878 89.5% 628 CIN 638 101.59% MLG 615 97.93%
1879 90.2% 632 BUF 659 104.27% TRO 599 94.78%

The 1880s
The game gradually professionalized in the 1880s, but not without a great many bumps along the way. The Union Association of 1884 was only barely a major league (four teams, including Wilmington, folded after playing less than a quarter of the schedule), but diluted the talent level of the two major leagues. The 4-ball/three-strike count wasn’t standardized until 1889, after a gradual decline in the number of balls for a walk and a one-year experiment in 1887 with four strikes for a strikeout; DERs rose sharply after the three-strike rule was restored. The schedule topped 100 games for the first time in 1884, and had reached 135 by 1888. The color line was established in the wake of the failure of Reconstruction (which effectively ended in 1877), after only a few black players had taken the field. The first gloves were becoming commonly used by decade’s end.
Anson’s 1882 White Stockings (now Cubs) and the 1882 Red Stockings (now Reds) became the first pennant-winning teams to lead the league in DER since the founding of the National League (in the NA, only the 1872 Boston team had done so); four teams would do so in each of the two leagues in ten years, plus the Union Association champs. Bid McPhee, enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 2000 largely for his defense, anchored the Red Stockings teams that led the league three times in their first six seasons in the league, and their 1882 and 1883 DERs were the most dominant of the decade outside the UA, but the mid-decade St. Louis Browns (now Cardinals) juggernaut also emerged as a defensive powerhouse. The woebegotten 1883 Philadelphia Quakers were the decade’s worst defensive team. The NL’s most successful defensive squad? The 1884 Providence Grays, much to the benefit of Old Hoss Radbourn, who had his famous 59-12, 1.38 ERA season. Radbourn also struck out 441 batters in 678.1 innings, so he did his share as well, and by a rough calculation the opposing BABIP of .242 – while a career best – wasn’t hugely out of line with his career .271 mark. Lucky and good is a good combination.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1880 88.8% 649 PRO 681 104.93% BUF 615 94.76%
1881 88.6% 641 CHC 664 103.59% BUF 613 95.63%
1882 87.4% 641 CHC 667 104.06% WOR 590 92.04%
1883 86.3% 617 CLV 651 105.51% PHI 553 89.63%
1884 81.2% 633 PRO 678 107.11% DTN 611 96.52%
1885 83.8% 651 NYG 697 107.07% BUF 613 94.16%
1886 81.1% 644 PHI 674 104.66% KCN 602 93.48%
1887 84.7% 647 DTN 663 102.47% WHS 635 98.15%
1888 83.9% 671 NYG 694 103.43% IND 659 98.21%
1889 82.0% 650 CLV 673 103.54% WHS 622 95.69%

American Association

BIP% AA High DER High % Low DER Low %
1882 89.3% 639 CIN 692 108.29% BAL 599 93.74%
1883 87.5% 631 CIN 688 109.03% PIT 591 93.66%
1884 83.7% 640 LOU 670 104.69% WAS 580 90.63%
1885 84.5% 649 STL 679 104.62% PHA 623 95.99%
1886 81.0% 643 STL 667 103.73% PHA 625 97.20%
1887 84.5% 630 CIN 658 104.44% NYP 595 94.44%
1888 82.8% 662 STL 702 106.04% LOU 626 94.56%
1889 81.0% 640 BRO 665 103.91% LOU 604 94.38%

Union Association

BIP% UA High DER High % Low DER Low %
1884 80.7% 591 SLM 644 108.97% WIL 539 91.20%

The 1890s
The NL achieved dominance after the Players League war. The modern era of pitching arrived in 1893 when the mound was moved back from 50 feet to its current 60 feet 6 inches; the percentage of balls in play spiked as strikeouts became almost non-existent, while DERs plunged in 1894 and 1895, suggesting more hard-hit balls off pitchers struggling to adjust to the new distance. The 1890 Pirates were the decade’s worst defensive team, the 1895 Baltimore Orioles (with extra balls hidden in the long grass of the outfield among their notorious tricks) the best, although the late-decade Beaneaters (now Braves, featuring Hall of Famers Hugh Duffy and Billy Hamilton in the outfield, Jimmy Collins at third, and Kid Nichols as the staff ace) were consistently dominant and would remain so through 1901. (Collins left in 1901, Duffy the previous year, but Nichols, Hamilton and infield anchors Herman Long, Bobby Lowe and Fred Tenney were there the whole time; Long and Nichols had also been on the 1891 team). Four teams had the NL’s best record while leading the league in DER, three of them Beaneaters teams.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1890 81.8% 663 CHC 696 104.98% PIT 598 90.20%
1891 82.1% 665 BSN 677 101.80% CLV 645 96.99%
1892 82.2% 672 CLV 697 103.72% BLN 625 93.01%
1893 84.4% 654 PIT 673 102.91% WHS 614 93.88%
1894 84.9% 626 NYG 651 103.99% WHS 601 96.01%
1895 85.5% 637 BLN 677 106.28% LOU 606 95.13%
1896 85.9% 649 CIN 673 103.70% WHS 625 96.30%
1897 86.0% 648 BSN 679 104.78% STL 618 95.37%
1898 86.2% 669 BSN 708 105.83% WHS 633 94.62%
1899 86.9% 660 BSN 699 105.91% CLV 610 92.42%

American Association

BIP% AA High DER High % Low DER Low %
1890 80.2% 652 COL 692 106.13% PHA 609 93.40%
1891 80.4% 653 COL 677 103.68% WAS 605 92.65%

Players League

BIP% PL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1890 82.6% 636 NYI 655 102.99% BUF 612 96.23%

The 1900s
The foul-strike rule, adopted in the NL in 1901 and the AL in 1903, brought back the strikeout and contributed, along with better gloves and more “small ball,” to rising DERs, as the NL in 1907 became the first league ever to turn 70% of balls in play into outs, rising to 71.4% in 1908, a level that would not be matched again until 1942. Schedules also started to be standardized in 1904, settling around 154 games after a decade mostly in the high 120s.
Surprisingly, defense was not the essential element for many of the pennant winners of the Dead Ball Era’s first decade – only one AL pennant winner (the 1903 Red Sox, featuring Jimmy Collins yet again) led the league, and only two NL pennant winners. That being said, the Cubs of the Tinker-Evers-Chance era have as good an argument as anyone to be the dominant defensive team of all time. They led the NL in DER eight times in nine years, as well as finishing a close second (at 726, 101.68% of the league) the ninth of those, and second again in 1912. In 1906, on the way to a 116-36 record, they became the first of five post-1900 teams to beat the league average by 5% or more, and their 736 DER bested the second-place Phillies by 29 points and would not be topped (in raw terms) for 62 years, by men using vastly superior equipment. It’s possible there was a park factor at work, although Baseball-Reference.com lists West Side Park (where the Cubs played until Wrigley opened in 1916) as if anything a hitters park until late in the decade; in 1906, the Cubs combined to score and allow 7.24 runs per game at home, 7.03 on the road, with the defense in particular allowing 2.22 runs per game on the road compared to 2.78 at West Side Park. Was it the pitchers? By my rough estimate, the BABIPs against four or the five pitchers on that staff to throw 1000 or more innings as Cubs between 1903 and 1912 -Three Finger Brown, Carl Lundgren, Orval Overall, and Jack Pfiester – varied between .237 and .241 compared to a team average of .241 for all pitchers to throw at least 200 innings on the team over those years, with only one such pitcher above .254. Only Ed Reulbach, at .230, seems to have stood out a bit. That suggests that the team’s defense was the predominant factor. The same BABIP figure for the rival Giants, a good but more normal defensive team, was .259 – the 19-point advantage on balls in play for Brown over Christy Mathewson is almost certainly the main explanation for why Brown’s ERA was better (1.75 to 1.90) over those years, although of course Brown was nonetheless a great pitcher.
Best AL defensive team? The 1901 Red Sox, another Jimmy Collins squad. Worst team of the decade? The unraveling 1902 Baltimore Orioles, who were deserted by John McGraw in mid-season and relocated to New York (now the Yankees) the following spring (like the prior year’s Milwaukee franchise – there’s a long history of teams getting folded or moved after cellar-dwelling DERs, as terrible defense is often a byproduct of organizational failure).
Also, note the atrocious showings by the late-decade Washington Senators, the team on which Walter Johnson broke in, yet another way in which Johnson’s early career was plagued by bad teams. Johnson would bear some closer study – a quick look suggests that his BABIPs may have been better than his teams’ for much of his career, as if he needed more advantages on top of leading the AL in K/BB ratio nine times, K/9 seven times, fewest BB/9 twice and fewest HR/9 three times (a favorite stat: Johnson in 1918-19 threw 616.1 innings and allowed just two home runs, both of them by Babe Ruth). His BABIP seems to have hit a career low of .219 in 1913 at the same time as his career high 6.39 K/BB ratio, another example of perhaps being both lucky and good, or perhaps there being a correlation between the two.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1900 86.3% 661 BSN 691 104.54% NYG 637 96.37%
1901 83.3% 664 BSN 685 103.16% CIN 640 96.39%
1902 84.3% 674 BRO 696 103.26% STL 648 96.14%
1903 83.5% 664 CHC 681 102.56% STL 647 97.44%
1904 83.7% 688 CHC 709 103.05% PHI 658 95.64%
1905 82.9% 683 CHC 716 104.83% BRO 649 95.02%
1906 82.0% 698 CHC 736 105.44% BSN 670 95.99%
1907 82.8% 702 CHC 730 103.99% BSN 685 97.58%
1908 83.7% 714 PIT 730 102.24% STL 698 97.76%
1909 82.2% 698 CHC 721 103.30% BSN 680 97.42%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1901 86.4% 658 BOS 684 103.95% MLA 647 98.33%
1902 86.2% 671 BOS 686 102.24% BLA 636 94.78%
1903 83.8% 680 BOS 695 102.21% WSH 668 98.24%
1904 82.9% 693 CHW 716 103.32% WSH 668 96.39%
1905 81.8% 697 CHW 721 103.44% NYY 688 98.71%
1906 83.3% 692 CLE 719 103.90% WSH 672 97.11%
1907 83.7% 693 BOS 710 102.45% WSH 666 96.10%
1908 82.7% 700 CHW 719 102.71% NYY 680 97.14%
1909 82.3% 695 PHA 717 103.17% SLB 676 97.27%

The 1910s
Defense had the upper hand in the teens, with DERs regularly topping 70% leaguewide in the second half of the decade, especially in the NL. If top defensive teams winning the pennant were a rarity in the prior decade, they became routine in the teens – five times in the NL, five in the AL. The Red Sox were the decade’s dominant team in the AL both defensively and overall, and continued to lead the league even after the departure in 1916 of Tris Speaker. (Oddly, the Red Sox went from the best DER in the AL in 1912 to the worst in 1913 and back to the best in 1914; more on that below.) Meanwhile, the NL’s revolving door of pennant winners (and World Series doormats) from 1915-19 were generally whoever handled the balls in play best. Yet most of those NL teams didn’t beat the league average by all that much, and the best single-season showing was the 1919 Yankees. The worst, unsurprisingly, was the post-fire-sale 1915 A’s (with a fossilized 40-year-old Nap Lajoie at second and their best remaining player, catcher Wally Schang, playing out of position at third), although the doormat 1911 Braves weren’t far behind.
The Cubs’ defense stopped being dominant with the 1913 departure of Joe Tinker, who went on to anchor the Federal League’s best defense, while Johnny Evers was part of lifting those Braves out of their 1911-12 defensive funk to a slightly above average defensive team in 1914 (they’d been below average in 1913 – that said, I’d expected the 1914 Miracle Braves to be one of the teams that had a huge year defensively, and even with Evers and Rabbit Maranville, they didn’t).
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1910 81.4% 688 CHC 708 102.91% STL 673 97.82%
1911 80.1% 684 CHC 698 102.05% BSN 649 94.88%
1912 81.2% 679 PIT 703 103.53% BSN 659 97.05%
1913 81.8% 691 NYG 702 101.59% CIN 684 98.99%
1914 81.5% 698 PIT 712 102.01% PHI 666 95.42%
1915 82.1% 704 PHI 715 101.56% NYG 687 97.59%
1916 82.3% 704 BRO 719 102.13% STL 684 97.16%
1917 83.2% 704 NYG 723 102.70% CHC 691 98.15%
1918 85.2% 707 NYG 723 102.26% BSN 695 98.30%
1919 85.2% 705 CIN 729 103.40% PHI 672 95.32%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1910 81.7% 692 PHA 713 103.03% SLB 663 95.81%
1911 80.6% 662 CHW 675 101.96% WSH 655 98.94%
1912 80.5% 666 BOS 683 102.55% NYY 640 96.10%
1913 81.1% 685 PHA 701 102.34% BOS 670 97.81%
1914 80.2% 692 BOS 709 102.46% CLE 662 95.66%
1915 80.1% 693 BOS 712 102.74% PHA 654 94.37%
1916 80.9% 698 BOS 713 102.15% PHA 668 95.70%
1917 82.4% 704 BOS 724 102.84% PHA 687 97.59%
1918 83.5% 705 BOS 729 103.40% DET 694 98.44%
1919 83.1% 689 NYY 715 103.77% PHA 661 95.94%

Federal League

BIP% FL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1914 80.7% 679 CHI 711 104.71% SLM 667 98.23%
1915 81.9% 694 CHI 708 102.02% BAL 660 95.10%

The 1920s
Lower strikeout rates with the lively ball’s arrival were probably the largest factor in the sudden increase in scoring in the Twenties, as even the gradual arrival of home run hitters and a leaguewide rise in walks couldn’t stop the upward march of the percentage of balls in play. But DERs dropped a good 15 points as well.
Defense was slightly more the hallmark of AL than NL pennant winners in the Twenties – six in the AL, four in the NL. Naturally the 1927 Yankees were the best in the league at this, too, their fifth league lead in nine years. And Walter Johnson finally got some real defensive support when the Senators won their two pennants in 1924-25, dropping Johnson’s BABIP from .280 to .248 in 1924.
As discussed in the next decade, you have to figure a significant park effect was at work in the fact that the Phillies were dead last in the NL in DER 14 times in their last 17 full seasons in the Baker Bowl, including the NL’s worst showing of the decade in 1926. Then again, nearly all of those Phillies teams were terrible teams, with a collective .383 winning percentage and only one winning record, in 1932 when their DER was 98.5% of the league average. And the Phillies had led the league in DER behind Grover Alexander in 1915.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1920 85.3% 693 CIN 708 102.16% STL 678 97.84%
1921 85.6% 680 PIT 696 102.35% PHI 658 96.76%
1922 84.7% 677 NYG 700 103.40% STL 663 97.93%
1923 84.5% 681 CHC 700 102.79% PHI 651 95.59%
1924 84.8% 687 PIT 704 102.47% PHI 665 96.80%
1925 84.3% 676 CIN 689 101.92% PHI 659 97.49%
1926 84.6% 689 STL 707 102.61% PHI 656 95.21%
1927 84.4% 687 PIT 705 102.62% PHI 663 96.51%
1928 83.6% 693 STL 707 102.02% PHI 666 96.10%
1929 83.1% 680 PIT 692 101.76% PHI 662 97.35%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1920 83.7% 677 NYY 689 101.77% PHA 656 96.90%
1921 83.5% 674 BOS 683 101.34% PHA 666 98.81%
1922 83.6% 687 NYY 707 102.91% CLE 669 97.38%
1923 83.1% 686 NYY 709 103.35% WSH 673 98.10%
1924 83.9% 682 WSH 709 103.96% CHW 666 97.65%
1925 83.3% 679 WSH 689 101.47% BOS 662 97.50%
1926 83.2% 689 CLE 702 101.89% DET 677 98.26%
1927 83.6% 684 NYY 701 102.49% SLB 666 97.37%
1928 83.2% 687 PHA 700 101.89% CLE 665 96.80%
1929 83.0% 687 PHA 703 102.33% DET 664 96.65%

The 1930s
1935 saw the arrival of night baseball, which would eventually be a factor in bringing back strikeout rates, as would the growth of relief pitching, still taking its first baby steps in the Thirties; between those factors and more home runs, the AL in 1937 became the first major league in which less than 80% of plate appearances resulted in a ball in play, after being above 83% in the AL and 84% in the NL for much of the Twenties. Six AL pennant winners had the league’s best DER, compared to just two in the NL.
The 30s were the best and worst of times. The Phillies hit their nadir in 1930, at 631 the worst raw DER since 1900 (the 1911 Braves being the only other team since 1906 to finish below 650), the worst relative to the league since the ill-fated 1899 Cleveland Spiders and the only team lower than 95% of the league average since the 1915 A’s. Not for nothing did they post a modern-record 6.71 team ERA, allow 7.69 runs per game, and lose nearly two-thirds of their games even with Lefty O’Doul batting .383/.453/.604 and scoring 122 runs and Chuck Klein (probably the most park-created of all Hall of Famers) batting .386/.436/.687 with 158 runs scored and 170 RBI. Then again, they also had the league’s worst K/BB ratio and allowed the league’s most homers, so it wasn’t all the defense’s fault. And the Phillies left the Baker Bowl for good at the end of June 1938, and still finished last in DER in 1938 and 1941 plus three more times in the mid-1940s.
In the AL, the late-30s St. Louis Browns, presumably despite Harlond Clift at third, were the league’s worst, hitting bottom in 1939. Also in St. Louis, if you’re curious, the 1934 “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals team was league-average.
On the positive end, we have the 1900s Cubs’ top competition for the title of the best defensive team of all time, the 1939 Yankees, the team that Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein (measuring by runs scored and allowed relative to the league) marked as the greatest team of all time in “Baseball Dynasties,” noting that they led the league in runs scored and fewest runs allowed four years in a row. So it’s not surprising to encounter them here. The Yankees’ DER was the furthest above their league of any team since 1885, and their 730 DER led the league by 35 points. This was part of a string of six straight seasons and 12 in 13 years when they had the league’s most successful defense, starting in Babe Ruth’s last year two years before the arrival of Joe DiMaggio and running clear through World War II. While a number of players appeared on many of those teams (DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich, Frank Crosetti, Red Rolfe, Joe Gordon), the only constants were manager Joe McCarthy and catcher Bill Dickey. (Both had also been on the 1933 team that was last in the AL in DER before cutting back the Babe’s playing time and putting Earle Combs and Joe Sewell, both 34, out to pasture). You have to give McCarthy some of the credit for the Yankees’ consistent defensive excellence, if only in how he chose to distribute playing time.
That said, a significant park effect can’t be discounted here. Yankee Stadium was always a pitcher’s park, and seems to have been a particularly extreme one in 1939: unlike for the Cubs, we have home/road detailed splits for the 1939 Yankees, which show that Yankee hitters had a BABIP of .273 at home, .315 on the road, while Yankee opponents had a BABIP of .248 at home, .267 on the road – combined, .260 at home, .292 on the road. I haven’t had time to run the splits for the Yankees’ whole run in that period – this essay took up quite enough of my time, and it would be a worthwhile project for someone else to carry on further – but even on the basis of the huge split for 1939, as remarkable as the Yankees’ defensive performance was in the McCarthy era, it has to be taken with the same grain of salt as the Baker Bowl era Phillies. (The 1930 Phillies’ Home/Road BABIP splits were .352/.300 for their offense, .365/.341 for their pitching staff, and a combined line of .358/.321 – a 36-point spread)
Speaking of managers, Walter Johnson may not have had great defenses as a pitcher, but as a manager he did better, skippering the Senators to two league-best DERs in four years from 1929-32. And the 1938 Braves became the first Casey Stengel-managed team to lead the league in DER, albeit a squad he inherited from Bill McKechnie with the decade’s best DER in the NL in 1937.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1930 82.8% 669 BRO 693 103.59% PHI 631 94.32%
1931 83.4% 687 NYG 706 102.77% PHI 666 96.94%
1932 84.0% 691 PIT 702 101.59% STL 673 97.40%
1933 85.1% 702 NYG 719 102.42% PHI 682 97.15%
1934 82.9% 685 NYG 704 102.77% CIN 666 97.23%
1935 83.2% 686 NYG 707 103.06% PHI 667 97.23%
1936 82.7% 684 CHC 698 102.05% PHI 666 97.37%
1937 81.3% 689 BSN 714 103.63% PHI 670 97.24%
1938 82.1% 697 BSN 711 102.01% PHI 675 96.84%
1939 81.7% 695 CIN 708 101.87% PIT 682 98.13%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1930 82.0% 678 WSH 702 103.54% CLE 661 97.49%
1931 82.0% 683 PHA 708 103.66% SLB 667 97.66%
1932 81.2% 688 WSH 703 102.18% CHW 674 97.97%
1933 81.5% 694 WSH 709 102.16% NYY 682 98.27%
1934 80.2% 684 NYY 703 102.78% CHW 677 98.98%
1935 81.2% 687 NYY 713 103.78% WSH 668 97.23%
1936 80.5% 676 NYY 690 102.07% SLB 657 97.19%
1937 79.5% 683 NYY 697 102.05% SLB 658 96.34%
1938 79.2% 685 NYY 694 101.31% SLB 671 97.96%
1939 79.9% 687 NYY 730 106.26% SLB 660 96.07%

The 1940s
In the 1940s, change was in the winds. The war decimated MLB’s talent level and introduced inferior baseballs (due to wartime shortages) that traveled poorly when hit. DERs rose back above 70% even before the war in the NL, and in 1942 in the AL. After the war, integration followed and the game was off to the races, while night baseball really came into its own.
In the NL, defense was king – seven pennant winners led the league in DER in nine years between 1939-47, plus the 104-win second-place 1942 Dodgers; four pennant winners led the AL, but three of those were the 1941-43 Yankees. The strongest defensive teams of the decade were McKechnie’s 1940 Reds and Lou Boudreau’s 1948 Indians (a team famous for its outstanding infield of Boudreau, Ken Keltner, Joe Gordon and Eddie Robinson), the weakest the 1940 Pirates and 1942 Senators (the difference between the Senators of the mid-40s and the Indians of the 50s explains a lot about Early Wynn’s career). The chicken-egg question remains regarding good defenses and successful managers, as Leo Durocher’s arrival in Brooklyn in 1939 and Billy Southworth’s in St. Louis in 1940 were followed within a few years by the construction of superior defensive teams.
The 1947 Reds were the third and last team to go from first to last in the league in DER in a single season, after the 1913 Red Sox and 1880 Buffalo Bisons:

Team Years DER1 DER2 Change Change %
BUF 1879-80 659 615 -44 93.3%
CIN 1946-47 716 693 -23 96.8%
BOS 1912-13 683 670 -13 98.1%

The Bisons and their ace pitcher, Hall of Famer Pud Galvin, hail from baseball’s ancient past, and the Red Sox were a bit of a fluke, given the small size of their decline and their rapid rebound the following year. What of the 1947 Reds? 1946 was the last season of McKechnie’s career, and McKechnie was notoriously defense-obsessed. The team gave a lot more playing time to 30-year-old shortstop Eddie Miller, outfielder Frank Baumholtz and noodle-armed 35-year-old left fielder Augie Galan. Sidearmer Ewell Blackwell had his big breakthrough season in 1947, improving his K/BB from 1.27 to a league-leading 2.03, but saw his ERA slip slightly from 2.45 to 2.47, while veterans Johnny Vander Meer and Bucky Walters got completely wiped out by the defensive collapse.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1940 81.5% 701 CIN 730 104.14% PIT 676 96.43%
1941 80.9% 704 BRO 732 103.98% PHI 683 97.02%
1942 81.2% 716 BRO 734 102.51% CHC 699 97.63%
1943 82.1% 707 STL 719 101.70% NYG 691 97.74%
1944 82.3% 707 STL 733 103.68% CHC 689 97.45%
1945 82.1% 701 CHC 718 102.43% PHI 674 96.15%
1946 80.2% 709 CIN 716 100.99% PHI 697 98.31%
1947 79.3% 703 BRO 720 102.42% CIN 693 98.58%
1948 79.0% 704 BSN 714 101.42% PHI 694 98.58%
1949 79.3% 707 NYG 722 102.12% CHC 684 96.75%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1940 79.1% 691 CHW 715 103.47% WSH 675 97.68%
1941 79.7% 698 NYY 714 102.29% WSH 680 97.42%
1942 80.9% 706 NYY 721 102.12% WSH 676 95.75%
1943 80.5% 714 NYY 725 101.54% SLB 703 98.46%
1944 81.9% 702 NYY 712 101.42% WSH 692 98.58%
1945 81.3% 707 NYY 716 101.27% CHW 692 97.88%
1946 78.4% 703 NYY 715 101.71% SLB 690 98.15%
1947 78.9% 712 CLE 734 103.09% WSH 697 97.89%
1948 78.8% 704 CLE 731 103.84% SLB 685 97.30%
1949 77.7% 707 CLE 724 102.40% SLB 680 96.18%

Part II here.

A History of Team Defense (Part II of II)

Part I here.
The 1950s
Baseball started moving west with the Braves’ move to Milwaukee in 1953, and the resulting shakeup ended the stranglehold of old, mostly smaller ballparks in the East. High walk rates, more power hitters and a few more strikeouts meant that balls in play rates were dropping, while defenses got stingier – the 71.6% of balls in play turned into outs in the NL in 1956 remains the league record.
I’ve written before about the advantage Casey Stengel’s Yankees got from their defense and how it played into the superior performance of pitchers in pinstripes. But it was the Indians who were the true defensive juggernaut of that era, leading the AL seven times in the decade between 1947-56. The AL was truly defensively stratified in those years, with the upper tier of the Yankees, Indians and White Sox at the top and weak sisters like the Browns, Senators, A’s and Tigers at the bottom. Park effects were part of that picture for the Yankees – for example, in 1955 the Yankees and their opponents had a BABIP of .265 at home, .278 on the road, compared to .272 at home, .269 on the road for the 1954 Indians.
The 111-win Indians were the best defensive team of the decade (the 1909 Pirates, who finished one point behind the Cubs, are the only team to win 110 games in a season without leading the league in DER), Durocher’s 1950 Giants the best NL team, the 1955 Pirates and 1950 Browns the worst; the Pirates were perennially hapless. Four pennant-winning teams in each league led the league in DER, although as I’ve noted the Yankees often finished second or third in DER while winning the pennant, and the 1953 Dodgers and 1957 Braves just narrrowly missed the league lead.
I’d expected the Ashburn-era Phillies to lead the league more than once; the strangest league leaders were the 1952 Cubs, an also-ran team that featured one of the more plodding sluggers (Hank Sauer) ever to win the MVP.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1950 77.7% 707 NYG 729 103.11% CHC 693 98.02%
1951 78.9% 711 NYG 721 101.41% PIT 697 98.03%
1952 78.1% 713 CHC 723 101.40% PIT 703 98.60%
1953 77.5% 702 MIL 715 101.85% PIT 687 97.86%
1954 77.8% 707 NYG 722 102.12% PIT 687 97.17%
1955 76.8% 714 PHI 728 101.96% PIT 688 96.36%
1956 76.8% 716 BRO 730 101.96% PIT 702 98.04%
1957 76.6% 706 BRO 717 101.56% CHC 698 98.87%
1958 75.8% 703 MLN 721 102.56% LAD 693 98.58%
1959 75.4% 701 CHC 714 101.85% STL 685 97.72%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1950 77.6% 700 CLE 721 103.00% SLB 676 96.57%
1951 78.6% 706 CLE 720 101.98% SLB 686 97.17%
1952 77.9% 713 CHW 723 101.40% DET 700 98.18%
1953 78.5% 706 CHW 720 101.98% DET 682 96.60%
1954 77.9% 711 CLE 735 103.38% PHA 689 96.91%
1955 76.7% 710 NYY 733 103.24% WSH 689 97.04%
1956 75.3% 705 CLE 722 102.41% WSH 683 96.88%
1957 76.6% 713 NYY 727 101.96% WSH 694 97.34%
1958 76.2% 712 NYY 726 101.97% WSH 697 97.89%
1959 76.0% 712 CLE 730 102.53% KCA 691 97.05%

The 1960s
Rising strikeout rates, with the onset of expansion, new pitchers’ parks in LA and Houston, and the expansion of the strike zone in 1963, are a major part of the story of pitching dominance in the Sixties; the AL in 1961, the year of Maris and Mantle, became the first league to see balls in play drop below 75% of plate appearances, and by 1964 it was down to 72.9%, the lowest it would be until 1987. Unsurprisingly, that started to loosen the relationship between defense and success – only three NL pennant winners led the league in DER, four in the AL, and the 1967 Twins came within a game of becoming the first team to finish first while being last in the league in DER.
Meanwhile, the story on balls in play showed a real split between the leagues: DERs actually declined in the NL, while reaching historic highs in the AL. The 724 DER in the AL in 1968 is the highest in Major League history, and the 743 figure by the 1969 Orioles is the highest ever recorded by a team. That Brooks Robinson-Mark Belanger-Davey Johnson infield and Paul Blair-led outfield really was impenetrable, and even adjusted for the league was the best of the decade, powering the O’s to 109 wins. (Home/road split: .275 at home, .278 on the road).
The Dodgers of the Sixties did well on balls in play, even as they dominated the pitcher-controlled aspects of defense (if I recall correctly, the 1966 Dodgers still hold the team K/BB ratio record).
The 1962 Mets, surprisingly, did not have the league’s worst DER (unlike the 1969 Seattle Pilots), finishing a point above the Astros; the 1969 Mets did lead the league (in fact, they led three years in a row from 1968-70), but other surprise teams of the decade did not – the 1967 Red Sox were just below the league average at 715, and the 1960 Pirates were also below average. Probably no team in this sample surprised me more with their poor defensive stats than the Pirates of the 1960s, finishing last in DER in 1961 and 1964 despite a lineup stocked with legendary defensive players like Bill Mazeroski, Roberto Clemente and Bill Virdon as well as other respected glove men like Dick Schofield Sr. The other surprise, more on which later, was the persistent poor performance of the Astros.
The Yankee dynasty’s collapse was reflected defensively, as the Yankees were second in DER in 1964 (at 726), but ninth in 1965 at 707.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1960 75.0% 703 LAD 714 101.56% PHI 694 98.72%
1961 75.0% 699 MLN 721 103.15% PIT 683 97.71%
1962 74.7% 695 SFG 710 102.16% HOU 680 97.84%
1963 74.8% 706 MLN 721 102.12% NYM 694 98.30%
1964 75.7% 698 LAD 709 101.58% PIT 682 97.71%
1965 74.5% 704 LAD 727 103.27% PHI 687 97.59%
1966 75.4% 699 STL 712 101.86% HOU 687 98.28%
1967 75.1% 703 SFG 719 102.28% HOU 683 97.16%
1968 75.8% 707 NYM 719 101.70% HOU 690 97.60%
1969 73.6% 701 NYM 729 103.99% HOU 683 97.43%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1960 75.8% 712 NYY 732 102.81% BOS 688 96.63%
1961 74.7% 708 BAL 731 103.25% KCA 689 97.32%
1962 74.7% 710 NYY 719 101.27% LAA 702 98.87%
1963 74.4% 713 NYY 725 101.68% WSA 701 98.32%
1964 72.9% 711 CHW 733 103.09% BOS 683 96.06%
1965 73.3% 715 CHW 728 101.82% BOS 692 96.78%
1966 73.9% 717 CHW 728 101.53% BOS 704 98.19%
1967 73.4% 718 CHW 735 102.37% MIN 704 98.05%
1968 74.0% 724 BAL 740 102.21% WSA 702 96.96%
1969 73.7% 714 BAL 743 104.06% SEP 691 96.78%

The 1970s
In the 1970s, even after the arrival of the DH, AL teams with top defenses tended to finish first in their divisions – 8 times in 11 years from 1969-79. In the NL, it was a different story, as teams like the Big Red Machine and the late-70s Pirates seemed often to lead the league in years other than the years those same teams finished first. The Dodgers led the league in DER four times between 1972 and 1978, and won the division the three years they didn’t.
You’ve met two of the five teams since 1900 to better the league average in DER by 5% or more, the 1906 Cubs and 1939 Yankees, both great teams that left the rest of their league in the dust. But the third team was one left in the dust by another juggernaut: the 1975 Dodgers, who led the league in DER by 20 points over the 108-win Reds, while finishing 20 games behind them (it didn’t help that the Dodgers underperformed their Pythagorean record by 7 games). Oddly, the very best Dodger defense came in a season when Bill Russell missed a good deal of time, but the then-youthful infield of Garvey, Lopes and Cey was otherwise tremendously durable, while 33-year-old Jimmie Wynn anchored the outfield defense (Wynn had also played on those late-60s Astros teams that perennially finished last in DER; go figure). Park effect? The Dodgers and their opponents combined for a .268 BABIP at home, .276 on the road, so the park seems to have had something to do with it. What about a pitching staff effect? Knuckleballer Charlie Hough had the team’s lowest BABIP (.219), but Hough threw only 61 innings. 321 innings were thrown by curveballer Andy Messersmith, and there may be something to that – pitcher BABIP are available since 1950, and Messersmith has the lowest career BABIP of any pitcher with 2000 or more career innings at .243 (rounding out the top 10, he’s followed by Catfish Hunter at .246, Hoyt Wilhelm at .250, Jim Palmer at .251, Hough at .253, Mudcat Grant at .258, Koufax at .259, Early Wynn at .260, and Tom Seaver and Warren Spahn at .262). The fact that that persisted across three teams (Angels, Dodgers and Braves) before he broke down in 1977 and that only Hunter’s even close to him suggests that Messersmith may have had some ability in that area. On the other hand, you have knuckle-curve specialist Burt Hooton, making the case for it being the team: Hooton’s BABIPs with the Cubs from 1972-94 were .278, .303 and .322, and .400 in the early going in 1975; after arriving with the Dodgers it dropped to .236, and was .253 over the next three seasons. Whether that’s the defense or the park, it’s evident that Hooton’s sudden improvement was due to the environment he pitched in.
The best AL defense of the decade was the Orioles again in 1973 (featuring much of the same cast, but this time with Bobby Grich at second); Earl Weaver’s defenses remained outstanding for years, as did Billy Martin’s when he arrived in New York (and brought in Paul Blair, among others). The worst were the 1974 Cubs and 1970 White Sox. Those Cubs featured Bill Madlock at third, 31 year old Don Kessinger at short, and an outfield of three guys who later became professional pinch hitters (Rick Monday, Jose Cardenal and Jerry Morales) and a DH at first (Andre Thornton). That said, BABIPs were higher at home – .312 at home, .296 on the road – so even aside from the home run ball, the park likely exaggerated the Cubs’s defensive failings in that era. Not for nothing did Rick Reuschel retire with a career BABIP of .294.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1970 73.3% 697 NYM 721 103.44% STL 686 98.42%
1971 75.6% 706 CIN 727 102.97% STL 689 97.59%
1972 74.7% 707 LAD 721 101.98% HOU 695 98.30%
1973 75.1% 704 LAD 729 103.55% CHC 687 97.59%
1974 75.9% 702 ATL 720 102.56% CHC 672 95.73%
1975 76.3% 700 LAD 737 105.29% CHC 673 96.14%
1976 77.0% 704 LAD 723 102.70% SFG 691 98.15%
1977 75.2% 698 PIT 711 101.86% ATL 677 96.99%
1978 76.2% 706 MON 718 101.70% CIN 697 98.73%
1979 76.3% 700 HOU 719 102.71% CHC 680 97.14%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1970 73.7% 710 OAK 728 102.54% CHW 684 96.34%
1971 74.8% 714 OAK 730 102.24% CHW 701 98.18%
1972 75.3% 718 BAL 740 103.06% BOS 699 97.35%
1973 75.7% 701 BAL 731 104.28% TEX 683 97.43%
1974 77.0% 702 BAL 716 101.99% MIN 691 98.43%
1975 76.1% 703 BAL 731 103.98% DET 683 97.16%
1976 77.7% 705 NYY 729 103.40% CHW 693 98.30%
1977 76.3% 698 NYY 714 102.29% CHW 682 97.71%
1978 77.7% 706 NYY 723 102.41% TOR 690 97.73%
1979 77.4% 700 BAL 727 103.86% OAK 678 96.86%

The 1980s
DERs in the AL finally dropped back in line with the NL by the late 70s, and the two leagues have mostly remained even since then. Balls in play percentages dropped in 1986, perhaps reflecting the rise in strikeouts occasioned by, among other things, the popularity of the split finger fastball and the increasing specialization of bullpens.
Best defensive team of the 80s: the Billyball A’s of 1980. In the NL: the far less remembered 1982 Padres. Worst: the 1981 Indians and 1984 Giants. The Whitaker-Trammell-Chet Lemon Tigers also stand out, although they are not as remembered as a defensive unit (but see the career of Walt Terrell). Their DER was also 713 when they had their big year in 1984, 705 in 1987.
The 1980s might be the decade that defense mattered least. Only two teams, the 1985 Blue Jays and 1989 A’s, finished first while leading the league in DER; the 1982 Giants came within two games of being the first team to finish first while being last in the league in DER, and a year later the “Wheeze Kids” Phillies turned the trick, remaining to this day the only team to be first in the standings and last in DER (the league hit .286 on BABIP against Cy Young winner John Denny, .329 against Steve Carlton). Those two teams had two things in common – an aging lineup (which for the Giants included Darrell Evans and Reggie Smith, the Phillies Pete Rose, Tony Perez, Gary Maddox, Mike Schmidt and Gary Matthews) and specifically, Joe Morgan at second base. I have to wonder about Morgan – it’s not a surprise that he would be found on poor defensive teams as his bat kept a decaying glove in the lineup in his late 30s (don’t forget, these were still good teams), but the Reds’ only league lead in DER in the 70s was in 1971, the year before Morgan’s arrival, and the Astros had routinely finished last during his years as their second baseman in the 60s. Could all be a coincidence, as Morgan’s defensive stats seem to suggest he was a fine glove man in his prime, but it bears closer examination.
The 1989 Yankees became the first Yankees team to finish last in the league in DER since 1933. The Mets finished second in the NL in DER in 1985, third in 1986. The Red Sox at 686 were below average in 1986, but at least not in the cellar as they were in 1985 and 1987.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1980 77.0% 700 LAD 715 102.14% CHC 680 97.14%
1981 77.2% 704 HOU 721 102.41% CHC 686 97.44%
1982 76.3% 701 SDP 725 103.42% SFG 688 98.15%
1983 74.9% 702 HOU 718 102.28% PHI 685 97.58%
1984 75.1% 698 SDP 721 103.30% SFG 676 96.85%
1985 75.0% 706 STL 718 101.70% ATL 691 97.88%
1986 73.3% 700 HOU 721 103.00% CHC 678 96.86%
1987 73.1% 696 PIT 711 102.16% CHC 677 97.27%
1988 75.3% 708 CIN 723 102.12% ATL 692 97.74%
1989 74.3% 709 SFG 725 102.26% PHI 699 98.59%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1980 77.7% 698 OAK 727 104.15% TEX 676 96.85%
1981 77.6% 711 DET 740 104.08% CLE 678 95.36%
1982 76.6% 704 DET 725 102.98% CHW 688 97.73%
1983 77.0% 699 DET 726 103.86% CAL 683 97.71%
1984 76.1% 699 BAL 715 102.29% SEA 683 97.71%
1985 75.2% 703 TOR 724 102.99% BOS 690 98.15%
1986 73.5% 699 DET 719 102.86% SEA 670 95.85%
1987 72.7% 697 CHW 714 102.44% BOS 674 96.70%
1988 75.1% 702 DET 718 102.28% CLE 692 98.58%
1989 75.3% 698 OAK 715 102.44% NYY 683 97.85%

The 1990s
DERs dropped sharply in 1993, inaugurating the era of…well, the Steroids Era, if you prefer. Or in the NL, perhaps the Mile High/Coors era. There were also ever fewer balls in play, with more and more homers, strikeouts and walks. Four NL teams finished first in DER and first in their division, three AL teams including the 1998 Yankees (the only Jeter-era Yankees team to finish either first or last in DER).
The worst defensive teams of the decade were the 1999 Rockies and 1997 A’s (the start of the “Moneyball” era – the A’s often fielded Jason Giambi and Matt Stairs in the outfield corners – although the winning A’s teams of a few years later would be above-average defensively, leading the AL in 2005). The Rockies’ home/road splits were so vast – .374 at home, .306 on the road in 1999 – that it’s almost impossible to evaluate their defense as such.
The 1990s also brought us the fourth of the five great defensive teams, the 1999 Reds, who led the league by a margin of 17 points over the Mets on the way to losing a one-game playoff for the wild card when their bats were stifled by Al Leiter. That Reds team is not recalled as widely as a great defense – it was the Mets that year who got the Sports Illustrated cover asking if they had the best infield ever – but with Barry Larkin, Mike Cameron and Pokey Reese, they had an outstanding defensive unit. Their home/road splits – .306 at home, .312 on the road – suggest that they did it without a huge amount of help from their home park.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1990 74.4% 701 MON 713 101.71% ATL 676 96.43%
1991 74.0% 706 ATL 714 101.13% NYM 689 97.59%
1992 74.8% 705 CHC 716 101.56% LAD 685 97.16%
1993 74.2% 692 ATL 711 102.75% COL 664 95.95%
1994 72.8% 688 SFG 707 102.76% COL 664 96.51%
1995 71.9% 688 CIN 699 101.60% PIT 669 97.24%
1996 71.5% 687 STL 706 102.77% HOU 667 97.09%
1997 71.2% 688 LAD 706 102.62% COL 667 96.95%
1998 71.3% 689 ARI 704 102.18% FLA 669 97.10%
1999 70.7% 687 CIN 722 105.09% COL 659 95.92%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
1990 74.4% 699 OAK 732 104.72% CAL 681 97.42%
1991 74.1% 699 CHW 728 104.15% CLE 678 97.00%
1992 75.0% 702 MIL 725 103.28% TEX 680 96.87%
1993 73.7% 693 BAL 704 101.59% MIN 679 97.98%
1994 72.3% 687 BAL 706 102.77% SEA 669 97.38%
1995 72.3% 690 BAL 716 103.77% DET 672 97.39%
1996 71.7% 683 MIN 694 101.61% BOS 665 97.36%
1997 71.6% 684 BAL 699 102.19% OAK 660 96.49%
1998 72.0% 686 NYY 708 103.21% TEX 668 97.38%
1999 71.8% 683 ANA 699 102.34% TBD 661 96.78%

The 2000s
Is defense the new market inefficiency? Maybe in the National League, as eight first-place teams led the league in DER between 2000 and 2010 compared to three in the AL (plus the 2002 Angels, who didn’t finish first but did win 99 games and the World Series). Even with BIP percentages dropping, marginal advantages in defense can still help make a division winner.
Worst DERs of the decade: the 2007 Rays and Marlins, both scraping just above 650. Best in the NL: the 2009 Dodgers. And the fifth and final team to beat the league by 5% or more – indeed, second only to the 1939 Yankees at 105.52% – the 2001 Mariners, who tied the 1906 Cubs’ record of 116 regular season wins. The Mariners featured Ichiro, John Olerud, Bret Boone, Carlos Guillen, and yes, Mike Cameron in center again. They got some help from Safeco (home/road split of .300/.322), where they led the AL again in 2003 (Cameron’s last year there) and 2004.
Then there’s the 2007-08 Rays. As I noted before the 2008 season, Baseball Prospectus’ optimistic PECOTA projection for the Rays required them to massively improve on their MLB-worst team defense; as I noted that October, they did just that, to the point where nearly the entire turnaround to a pennant-winning team was a function of becoming the MLB’s best defensive team in one year. This made them just the ninth team ever to go worst-to-first in their league in DER in one year (other unsurprising names on that list include the Billyball A’s and the 1991 Braves), and aside from a team from 1878, Tampa’s defensive improvement was the largest leap of any of those teams, a 56-point or 8.6% improvement, which made their pitching staff much better without changing its personnel. The Rays did this returning five regulars – Carl Crawford, BJ Upton, Akinori Iwamura, Carlos Pena and Dioner Navarro – although Upton in 2007 was still learning center field as a new position, and Iwamura moved from third to second in 2008. Adding Evan Longoria and Jason Bartlett, plus clearing out some less mobile players and letting the incumbents settle in, led to a historic turnaround:

Team Years DER1 DER2 Change Change %
CIN 1877-78 561 638 77 113.7%
TBR 2007-08 652 708 56 108.6%
CLV 1891-92 645 697 52 108.1%
PHI 1914-15 666 715 49 107.4%
OAK 1979-80 678 727 49 107.2%
BOS 1913-14 670 709 39 105.8%
ATL 1990-91 676 714 38 105.6%
WSH 1923-24 673 709 36 105.3%
NYY 1933-34 682 703 21 103.1%

National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
2000 70.3% 689 CIN 702 101.89% MON 672 97.53%
2001 70.4% 693 ARI 703 101.44% MON 682 98.41%
2002 71.2% 695 LAD 716 103.02% SDP 675 97.12%
2003 71.6% 694 SFG 710 102.31% COL 678 97.69%
2004 71.2% 693 LAD 711 102.60% COL 677 97.69%
2005 72.0% 693 HOU 705 101.73% COL 670 96.68%
2006 71.2% 690 SDP 710 102.90% PIT 674 97.68%
2007 71.5% 688 CHC 704 102.33% FLA 659 95.78%
2008 70.5% 689 CHC 703 102.03% CIN 671 97.39%
2009 70.2% 692 LAD 713 103.03% HOU 677 97.83%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
2000 71.7% 684 ANA 699 102.19% TEX 667 97.51%
2001 72.3% 689 SEA 727 105.52% CLE 670 97.24%
2002 72.4% 695 ANA 718 103.31% CLE 674 96.98%
2003 73.2% 694 SEA 721 103.89% TEX 674 97.12%
2004 72.1% 689 SEA 699 101.45% KCR 674 97.82%
2005 73.5% 694 OAK 715 103.03% KCR 666 95.97%
2006 72.6% 685 DET 701 102.34% TBD 671 97.96%
2007 72.1% 684 BOS 704 102.92% TBD 652 95.32%
2008 71.9% 688 TBR 708 102.91% TEX 666 96.80%
2009 70.8% 688 SEA 712 103.49% KCR 675 98.11%

The 2010s
History continues to march on: the NL in 2010 became the first league in baseball history to have less than 70% of all plate appearances result in a ball put in play.
2011 stats are through May 31, 2011. DERs can be volatile in-season; I noted a few weeks ago that the Astros were at 648, 633 around the beginning of May, which would have set them on pace as the first defensive team since the 1930 Phillies to finish below 650, but since replacing Angel Sanchez with Clint Barmes they’ve been on an upward trajectory, and are no longer even last in their division. As you can see, the Cubs are having a terrible defensive year, while the Braves and those Rays again (even sans Carl Crawford and Jason Bartlett) are flying high. The AL (unlike the NL) is above 700 this season, the first time either league has cracked 700 since 1992.
National League

BIP% NL High DER High % Low DER Low %
2010 69.7% 689 SFG 707 102.61% PIT 671 97.39%
2011 70.2% 695 ATL 716 103.02% CHC 665 95.68%

American League

BIP% AL High DER High % Low DER Low %
2010 71.4% 694 OAK 711 102.45% KCR 679 97.84%
2011 71.6% 702 TBR 723 102.99% CHW 691 98.43%

Part I here.