What if Baserunning and Defense Were as Valuable as Hitting?

In just about any sport you can name, offense is king. If you’re the one who scores the goals, the points, the runs, the whatever they call it in polo – the biscuits, maybe? – you’re going to get the plaudits. Who’s the greatest defenseman in the history of hockey? It’s Bobby Orr, of course, because he was the first great offensive defenseman. This pattern very much holds when it comes to baseball.

Among other things, the sabermetric revolution helped us codify the value of hitting relative to the other facets of the game. To wit, according to weighted runs above average – and we’re using that particular stat because, like standard baserunning and defensive metrics, it’s a counting stat that compares a player to the performance of an average player – the most valuable hitter during the 2025 season was one Aaron Judge. Judge created 82.5 more runs than the average hitter. That’s 21 runs more than any other player, and an astonishing 36 more than any other player not named Shohei Ohtani. Judge was the best offensive performer in the game by a mile, which makes him the frontrunner for the American League MVP award, even though he put up negative value as a baserunner and, depending on which metric you trust, his defense graded out somewhere between pretty good (DRS, FRV) and really bad (DRP). The best defender was Patrick Bailey, who put up 30 fielding runs, and the best baserunner was Corbin Carroll, who finished with a measly 10.3 baserunning runs. Offense is just more valuable than defense and baserunning. Here’s the distribution of values for the three portions of the game:

Hitting is so much more valuable than the other two components, and the range of outcomes is much wider. There’s no such thing as a baserunner who’s so slow that they can’t advance from first to second on a single or so fast that they can consistently go all the way from first to home. A fielder can only steal an out at a time (or a strike, if they’re a catcher), and you get a lot more chances to hit a home run than to rob one. Ohtani and Judge are unquestionably the best players in the game right now because of their hitting prowess (not to mention that whole Ohtani pitching deal), but what if we were to even things out?

In this article, we’re going to act as if defense and baserunning are just as valuable as hitting in order to find the most productive all-around position player in the game. In order to do that, we’ll need to put all three elements on the same scale. Essentially, we’re handicapping batting value in order to weight all three facets equally. Luckily, these values are already normalized against the league average, so we don’t have to worry about that part. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll normalize everything to 100 runs. Judge’s 82.54 wRAA constitutes 100 of our runs, so every player’s wRAA is multiplied by 1.21. Likewise, Carroll’s 10.3 baserunning runs mean that all baserunning totals are multiplied by 9.74 and Bailey’s 30 fielding runs mean that all fielding totals are multiplied by 3.33. Is there a smarter, more complicated way to do this? Probably, but this should work just fine. Now fielding and baserunning are every bit as valuable as hitting.

So who’s the MVP in this league? If you want to peruse the entire leaderboard, this link will take you to a spreadsheet. I’ll show you the top 10 and the bottom 10 here. In the spirit of kindness, I’ll share some thoughts about the leaders, and I’ll spare you the gory details about how poor Edgar Quero ended up with a score of -85.

Bobby Witt Jr. is our king, which feels fitting as he’s already royalty. Witt makes a whole lot of sense at the top. He’s a true five-tool player, which means a lot in this particular version of reality. Keep in mind that we’re not messing with positional adjustments, so he’s not getting a bump because he plays shortstop. He’s just that great at everything. That’s rarer than you may realize. Only three players put up enough value this year to be above a 20 in all three categories: Witt, Trea Turner, and Fernando Tatis Jr. It’s a really impressive feat. Meanwhile, thanks to a -40 in baserunning, Judge fell all the way to 19th despite his 100 mark in hitting.

The big takeaway is that we’ve got a whole lot of athletes on this leaderboard. Speed is really helpful when it comes to both baserunning and defense, so it’s no surprise to see players like Carroll and Pete Crow-Armstrong. As we’ve all been saying for years, Byron Buxton really is one of the best, most complete players in the game when he’s healthy. We shouldn’t be surprised to see José Ramírez either. No matter how tortured our math, no list of the game’s best all-around players would be complete without him.

Of course, you can’t keep Shohei Ohtani off the top 10 either, no matter that he doesn’t get any defensive credit as a designated hitter. He’s that good a hitter, and he’s that good a baserunner even when he’s not going out and stealing 59 bases. By all rights, we should replace his defensive zero with a total that reflects the value he brings as a pitcher. If we were to do so – giving him credit for 17.6 runs above replacement, which would turn into 29.8 when we grade on our curve – he would sneak past Turner for fourth place at 141. He’s pretty good, and frankly, he threatens to make a mockery of this whole exercise. How could anyone be more well-rounded than Ohtani?

One fun thing to note is that even though Ohtani was the second-most productive hitter in baseball this year, his score in the hitting column is only 75. That’s because Judge is absolutely destroying the curve for everybody. But as good as Judge is on offense, Bailey is crushing the curve even harder on defense. The second-highest defensive mark is a 73, because 30 FRV is the second-highest mark recorded in the 11 years the stat has been available. First place belongs to Bailey’s general manager Buster Posey, who earned 32 FRV in 2016. Baserunning is much more egalitarian, with De La Cruz coming in second at 91.

That number prompts the shocking realization that as much as we celebrate De La Cruz’s exploits, we may still be underestimating his baserunning prowess. Although he didn’t repeat his massively aggressive 67-stolen base 2024 season, he still notched 37 swipes and continued to be one of the games best baserunners beyond just stealing. He vaulted to second in the league because he stayed just as aggressive in terms of taking the extra base, and he didn’t get thrown out even once when trying to do so.

Where’s Cal Raleigh, you might ask? Well, Raleigh is all the way down at 35th in part because of his -27 baserunning, but also because the two areas in which he excels are the two parts of the game that have the steepest curves. He was fifth in our offensive score, at 55, but that was still 45 points below Judge. He was a strong defender, but not on Bailey’s level; his defense graded out at 23, which ranked 32nd.

Ceddanne Rafaela may be the most interesting player on this list. He’s the only member of the top 15 with a negative number in any column. For a while this season, it looked like Rafaela might add hitting to his excellent defense and baserunning, but he regressed and finished with a 91 wRC+. What makes his defense even more impressive is that injuries to teammates once again forced him into the infield, where he’s not a special defender. He spent 24 games at second base and his defense graded out perfectly average there. He earned a Gold Glove as an outfielder and finished top three in all three major defensive metrics despite basically ceding one-seventh of the season. Rafaela’s baserunning is also a pleasant surprise. He was worth 0.6 baserunning runs in 2024, but he added 15 percentage points to his stolen base success rate and got more aggressive when it came to taking extra bases. He really can be a valuable piece even if he never figures it out at the plate, and in this warped version of reality, he’s already one of the very best.

It would be fun to live in this world, where baseball’s most athletic players dominate the game just as thoroughly as any big slugger, and the wiry Bobby Witt Jr. reigns as king. Instead, we’ll have to stay in our boring reality where, well, I guess we still have Shohei Ohtani. It’s not all bad.