Brew Crew Ball, a Milwaukee Brewers community

The title link brings you to a nice profile of new defensive stats from Mariners beat writer Geoff Baker, and this blog entry is a general defense of stats. Both are excellent pieces, and the defense article is a nice background for those who want to learn more about the subject. h/t Lookout Landing

It's a new and improved Wins Above Replacement metric, under the new "Value" section on each player page. It's incredibly simple to understand. "Batting" is batting runs above average, "Fielding" is UZR, and the positional adjustment is all factored in. Then it gives you total runs and total wins above replacement level, followed by a dollar value on the production. For example, Ryan Braun was worth 4.1 wins last season, which would cost $18.4 million on the open market.

If you use Firefox (and if you don't, you should, though it works on IE 7 as well), click the link to add Fangraphs Player Search to the search engine options in the top right corner of the page. Then you just type a player's name, and you can easily find their wOBA, UZR, LD%, and many other numbers to add to your argument!