Since the Mariners seem to be so persuaded that the way to win is to build a great fielding team, I've long been meditating on the relative importance of fielding and the limits of the possible value of a great defense.  My thoughts got a kick in the posterior by a great conversation ongoing at baseball-fever.com in a thread I started some three years ago dedicated to providing data and answering questions on the subject of Pythagorean Comparative Analysis (PCA)…which as you may or may not remember, is the Win Shares-like uberstatistical value summary metric I created using logic that is, without meaning to sound immodest, probably 1/10th as fuzzy as Bill James' attempt.

Someone asked me what would happen if I took the most valuable fielding seasons of all time and put them on one team while assuming that they combined for a collectively average offense and were supported by collectively average pitching?  Below is a table showing the win-value (as estimated by PCA) of the completely average team in a 162 game schedule along with the win values of the top fielding seasons of all time, prorated out to 162 games.

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