Nick Punto is not just adequate at defense, he is phenomenal. Just look at how the infield shifts with Punto is playing third. Both Hardy and Hudson were amazed with how much ground Punto can cover when they joined the team; it allows both Hardy and Hudson to play even better defense themselves. It allows our infield to provide much more coverage, and that has a dramatic affect on then number of hits the other team gets. It helps out the pitchers a lot. Really, Punto adds a lot to the infield defensively–and it is just laughable to say he could be replaced by any number of minor leaguers. That is not true.

Punto is not the best player in the world, but he is way better than any other option the Twins have, and he is very valuable defensively. Anyone who thinks defense isn’t valuable clearly doesn’t understand the game and is not a real Twins fan.

The WAR values on Fangraphs are heavily influenced by playing time, and the position(s) they actually played, rather than the ones they’re capable of playing. This is important to consider when you’re comparing the production of two players who had dissimilar playing time.

In 2009, Punto produced a total of 13 runs above replacement (1.3 WAR). Of those 13 runs, 14.7 of them came from “replacement level,” which comes simply from the innings you played. He got a positional adjustment of 3.7 runs because when he played, he was at 2B or SS almost exclusively.

Meanwhile, Tolbert played very little at SS; his minimal time was split between 2B and 3B, which gave him a positional adjustment of just 1 run; he also played a whole lot less than Punto did: he got just 7.7 runs from his replacement category. (About half the playing time.)

According to an extremely small sample size, Tolbert produced -1.7 runs for his fielding; his numbers for 3B are good, and his numbers for 2B are bad. But neither is even worth trusting yet, since they’re just for a few dozen games.

There isn’t enough of a statistical record for Tolbert to really measure his value, but the early indications are that he’s basically a poor man’s Punto: not quite as good at hitting, and not quite as good at fielding, and not quite as versatile. So right now, they’re probably not interchangeable.

You wouldn’t be getting as much production with Tolbert, but you’d have to balance that against a few factors; namely, if it’s more important to you to get value or production, and that depends on where you are on the win curve.

Right now, the Twins are high on the win curve, and it’s worth paying a little more for Punto rather than going for better value with Tolbert. For a team that isn’t as close to contending, the opposite decision would likely be the correct one. (For example, the Pirates would much rather have Tolbert than Punto in our example, because the minimal difference between them wouldn’t mean anything to them in the standings. Meanwhile, the minimal difference between them very well could be the difference between going to the playoffs and going home — the Twins have won or lost the division by 1 game in 3 of the last 4 years.)

But just because Tolbert isn’t as good as Punto doesn’t mean Punto should be a starting third baseman, nor does it mean that one team needs both of them. At this point, though, it seems clear that if the choice is to be limited to between Punto and Tolbert, then the correct answer for the Twins, in 2010, is Punto.

Since you generally pay around market value on the free agent market, you need to take advantage of far-below-market rates for the players coming out of your farm system. For example, assuming Tolbert and Punto are interchangeable players, the Twins would be much better served getting $5M worth of production from Tolbert for $0.4M than they would be getting $5M of production from Punto for $4M.

I have the feeling that if there’d been a Twins blogosphere in the 90s, people would have ripped him a lot like Punto … along with a whole host of other inept “baseball players” on those teams.

It’s hard to remember what things were like before we were all on the internet. How did anyone survive?