The Designated Columnists select the best of things you didn’t know had best-of categories 2012

If you watched “Moneyball” last year, you might have come away with the impression that we statheads were all Jonah Hill clones who didn’t give a damn about speed and defense. I’d like to tell you that you were misinformed, but the description was actually pretty damned accurate for a time. Back in the day, so-called sabermetricians had tremendous difficulty quantifying defense and were, in many cases, convinced that a poor defender wasn’t worth that much less than a good one. We also minimized stolen bases and baserunning prowess (with the exception of those committed by sabermetric-god Rickey Henderson and his acolyte Tim Raines) in favor of players taking walks and moving from station to station. I blame Matt Stairs.

As our colleague Rob Neyer pointed out on many occasions during the take-and-rake era, that kind of baseball was inherently boring, as fans had to wait around through pitch after pitch for something, anything to happen. Some say that the chess match between a pitcher and a hitter is the best part of the game, but we live for the moments when the ball meets the bat and players around the diamond react, covering bases, setting up the cutoff, and backing each other up. Triples, sacrifice flies, stolen base attempts, sprawling catches, diving stops, and leaping grabs- while the Three True Outcomes are beautiful in their simplicity, baseball is at its best, and its most exciting, when it’s complicated.