Not only does he acquire a useless, aging player with deteriorating skills and a bad attitude, but he actually gave away a serviceable player in the process. Was Cory Sullivan not a better option than GMJ, regardless of salary??? Of course he is…

Well played, Omar. Well played indeed.

Dayton???

BTW, using 2008 data, the linear r-squared (simple regression) of BABIP-against to UZR is 56.33%. It breaks down a bit using 2009 data (45.23%), but still, BABIP-against is a rough measure of how well a team turns balls into outs, so UZR correlating well with it shows UZR = not worthless.

This isn’t going to be news to anybody here, but have a look at the team pitching BABIP (sort on it — I wish the sort column was captured in links). Some of that is going to be the monster, but still.

Stat geeks will tell you that those magnificent diving catches are the result of Ellsbury’s speed making up for his bad read of the ball off the bat. That’s all well and good, but chances are, if the ball ends up ensnared in Ellsbury’s glove, the Red Sox are happy.

I bet Jim Riggleman is happy when Adam Dunn catches the ball, too. This means nothing.

Terry Francona probably sleeps a little easier knowing he’s got such solid defense in center, and Red Sox pitchers likely don’t mind knowing that no bloop will fall in shallow center and no blasts will hit the dirt in the triangle.

No bloop? Remember Game 3, inning 9, ALDS? No? Moving on…

Yet according to FanGraphs, Ellsbury’s ultimate zone rating was -18.6 in 2009 — good for dead last among center fielders. Only Toronto’s Vernon Wells had nearly as low a rating (-18.2), and only two other players (Colorado’s Dexter Fowler and the Cubs’ Kosuke Fukudome) were in the negative double-digits.

But for anyone who wants to live and die by the defensive statistics, then what is there to say about Ellsbury’s 2008 statistics? In 2008, Ellsbury’s UZR was a cool 16.5. Yes, on the other side of zero. So if the stats are to be believed, Ellsbury spent the 2008 offseason eating Cheetos and working on deadening his reaction skills. His jump was just too good — nearly dangerous — for his own good, so he must have wanted to get much, much worse. You know, for safety’s sake.

Or, he switched to a tougher position and didn’t pan out as well. But who needs facts when making points?

Jacoby Ellsbury is simply a solid defensive player. The argument that he is subpar brings to mind Mike Lowell’s assessment of scouts and reporters who said that his bat speed slowed tremendously in 2005. In his autobiography, he wondered where exactly those scouts kept their bat speedometers and how exactly those things worked.

In the case of Lowell, the scouts and pundits were dead wrong. In the case of Ellsbury, so too are the stats.

Okay, so take one skill from a different guy, say that the scouts and eyeballs were wrong, and then ascribe a totally new villain to a totally different skill to a totally different guy. My 4th grade English teacher called me a bad writer. She was wrong, therefore when Billy Bob tried to argue 2+2 = 5 in his junior college math class, he argued it so excellently and the stats don’t matter.