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Well, the torch has been passed. After years of being lamented by the evil ol' mainstream media (and predictably celebrated by the self-styled Noam Chomskys of baseball, the bloggers) for his strikeouts (gasp!) and poor defense, Adam Dunn, formerly the poster boy for the "Old Moneyball," has suddenly started to get props for his intangibles. Don't believe me?

Just a couple of weeks ago, legendary baseball writer Thomas Boswell published a long column for the Washinton Post bearing the epic title "A Paul Bunyan in Their Midst" that is dedicated to praising Dunn. Dunn is portrayed as not only an outstanding hitter, but as the elder statesman,  heart, and soul of this (horrible) Nationals team -- the one guy who will step up and volunteer to play another position when Nick Johnson is (you aren't going to believe this) hurt and unable to play, the guy who accepts accountability when the team loses. It seems hard to believe that a guy with only a .261 batting average this season  could get this sort of praise, but he does. And Boswell acknowledges the change in the perception of Dunn, as well Check out these excerpts:

Throughout his eight years with the Reds, five of them 40-homer seasons, Dunn was typecast as the easy-going lug who didn't care enough -- about the team, his defense, his conditioning. That image was part of the reason the Nats got him when the free agent market dried up and his phone didn't ring. Why, $20 million was enough to get a 275-pound slugger for two years. The Nats probably could have signed him for a third year, too, but shied away. Dunn says that image was never him. Whatever. It's not him now....

 

Now, instead of riding the rails to New York thinking how dismal they are, the Nats can, if they choose, focus on a kind of mythic strongman in their midst who takes pressure off Zimmerman, who hit balls off scoreboards in Arizona that nobody believed would ever be reached and who cracks jokes while he's doing it.

"Adam makes everybody feel better," said reliever Joel Hanrahan who, in recent days, has rediscovered his 96 mph fastball and even added a bit of bravado to his mound manner. Is this the Dunn swagger?

"Don't know," said Hanrahan. "But I need to get some 'attitude' out there."

The attitude, the swagger, the mythical strongman... And it's not just Thomas Boswell, who, while he's fallen off the rails a bit with his RBI fetish,  at one time was something of a "numbers guy." Sure, we don't use "Total Average" anymore, but we still think highly of Aristotle even if we find his biology laughable today. Like I said, Boswell, isn't alone. Buster Olney has gotten in on the act, too, raving about how Dunn tooks some ideas from the World Baseball Classic. Somehow, this has lead to Ryan Zimmerman's offensive display this season.

It's not just Dunn's play, then, that is taking the Nats to new "heights" or whatever you want to call the current state of that franchise. It's his intangibles and work ethic. He's a new man since the WBC, maybe. He's a leader. He's tough. He brings swagger.

One might almost say it's Derek Jeter -esque.

Maybe it's because I don't watch much ESPN, but I haven't noticed as much raving about The Captain this season. Sure, he's still probably lionized in the NY Post and Daily News, as well as used a the object lesson by online writers for "overrated" just to show their union card,  but speaking strictly from my perspective, there hasn't been as much of is this season. Maybe all the new arrivals in New York, CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, A.J. Burnett, New Yankees Stadium Fan Favorite Nick Swisher, coupled with the who A-Rod Circus, have simply distracted everyone from Captain Derek.

It's just a weird contrast. I'm not sure what to make of it overall... maybe the "mainstream media" is finally catching up with the bloggers, and realizes that sluggarldy sluggers who "just" walk and hit home runs can be just as valuable as overrated shortstops who are (oooh boy I'm going burst your bubble) bad at defense. Heck, it turns out Dunn's got the intangibles as well, if you read the articles linked above.

Maybe it's something else, though. Aside from his "indisputable" new leadership qualities that have made the Nationals the awesome force that they are, Dunn certainly stil does one thing: he hits the baseball. Check it out: he has a wOBA of .401 as of this writing. That's over 14 runs above average in about a third of a season. No doubt, he's still the offensive machine (despite the Ks) who walks and powers his team just as Moneyball preached.

But look more closely a the value section of Dunn's FanGraphs player page. check the fielding. He's +14.2 hitting, but so far he's already -13.5 fielding. And that's mostly in the corner outfield and first base-- not exactly a demanding position. If you add it all together, his Runs Above Replacement (RAR) is 6.1. Not bad. But keep in mind that is value over a freely available player, represented by his 8.2 "Replacement" runs for playing time. Take those away, and he's actuall -2.1 runs below average. Long story short: he's giving up  more runs above (or below) average as a defender at relatively easy  positions than he is creating above average at the plate. Oh, I see the problem... there's no line for "intangibles" at FanGraphs.

Now let's take a look at another FanGraphs player page, that of Derek Jeter. He's got a .377 wOBA. That's good, but not as good as Dunn's. And that doesn't account for all the NY bias Jeter gets in the calculations! But now let's look at his value section. He's produced 10 runs above average -- again, good, but not as good as Dunn's. But his Fielding is actually pretty good this season, at least according to Ultimate Zone Rating 1.5 runs above average. And he was almost average in 2008 as well (previous to that, of course, he put up seasons of about -14, -7, and -15). And it's at shortstop, the hardest position to field. He's at 22.6 RAR, which is about what an average player would produce... over a full season.

So what's the deal, and the point? There isn't really any one point here. It's just a roundabout way of noting a bit of irony: Dunn is finally getting recognition for his intangibles at a time his objective offensive value is mostly canceled out by his defensive ineptitude, while at a time when Derek Jeter is recognized as a poor defensive shortstop, he's actually doing pretty well there so far, and hitting too. And few are talking about his leadership this season -- again, as far as I can see.

It's just too easy to note the irony of  "mainstream" writers just getting on the OBP+power train right after it left the station, while the formerly celebrated Jeter enjoys a mini-comeback season (at least so far, the season is still relatively young). If I can type this without being overly snarky, it seems to be a fitting overture for the "outsider" status of the Moneyball, Baseball Prospectus , and Fire Joe Morgan era of sabermetrically-informed writing.

Or maybe there's a deeper, more frightening "objective" truth at the bottom of all of this: Perhaps leadership and intangibles are inversely related to defensive contribution.