[RedsManRick]

Great post Jake. I think you've summarized it very well. Range is so important, arguably the most important defensive skill, and almost completely ignored by the general media due to the lack of an accepted statistic.

While the Reds pitching is not great, the difference between the performances we've been getting and league average can be attributed almost entirely to our craptastic defense.

One of the corollaries to this point that I've been running with lately, is that the Reds need to shift their offensive production. As it stands now, we're in a catch-22 where we can't improve our defense without hurting our offense and we can't improve our pitching without either significant cost or improving our defense. Basically, this team can't win with Junior and Dunn as the offensive keystones and our corner OF. It's a fundamental design flaw that has to be fixed.