August Fagerstrom has a look at the A's team defense over at FanGraphs. It's bad, folks.

Fagerstrom relies on DRS and UZR for the most part, which are black-box stats based on black-box data, but the intent is to capture far more than can be captured by simple stats based on publicly available data. By those simple stats, it's worth noting that the A's are bad, but not quite as historically so -- they're only third-worst in the league at turning batted balls into outs. (Adding a somewhat black-box-y gloss to that, Baseball Prospectu publishes a park-adjusted version of that metric; the A's rank sixth-worst in that.)

I don't know what the truth is. I do know that the eye test, which Fagerstrom notes he can't effectively apply, seems to confirm the stats. Billy Burns has speed but his routes and jumps seem questionable; Coco Crisp isn't what he used to be, and his arm remains a major negative; Jed Lowrie is more or less surehanded, but he's never had range; Marcus Semien has worked hard on his hands and arm, but seems to have inherent limits on his range; Danny Valencia is a slugger; Billy Butler is quite poor, even to someone who remembers Jason Giambi. The bright spots are the always-good Josh Reddick and the very slick Yonder Alonso, and Reddick has of course missed the last few weeks with his busted wrist, while Alonso is someone whose bat doesn't leave anyone in a hurry to stuff him into the lineup. I never really got a handle on Chris Coghlan's defense, but that's Chicago's problem now; on the other hand, it's hard to imagine that Max Muncy, who's going to be learning the outfield more or less on the fly, is going to improve on the job Coghlan was doing in right field, and to the extent Muncy has to play any third base, well ...

I never thought I'd hope so hard for a Sam Fuld comeback.