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...I understand your point regarding the Zero Evidence mantra...I get annoyed with saberdweebs who overuse that phrase with regards to very...very complicated problems like the mpact of a baserunner on the pitcher or bullpen leverage as a guage of managerial skill or HR/Fly persistance, etc...I chose to use that phrase in this case because I have actually STUDIED the question of line-up protection (not run my own studies, but read VORACIOUSLY on the subject, because I got frustrated with being told one thing by ESPN announcers and another thing by my own life experiences)...dozens of guys amrter than me have tried to find the tracks in the snow from the elephant of line-up protection and utterly failed.
What I am particularly troubled by here is that while you decry my own use of the zero evidence phrase, you speak in absolutes as though your opinion that the Mariners lacked an MLB (TM) clean-up hitter and therefore the rest of the hitters all had bad years from trying too hard to compensate is fact.  That's just as bad as the crime you accuse me of committing here.  And everyone is merrily buying in...the 2010 crashed because they went obsessively for defense and the results manifestly prove that building a great defensive team will lose you 100 games.  That's the line you're selling and most of the readers here believe you.  And I think that's unfortunate, because I don't think that's an accurate description of what ailed the 2010 Mariners nor do I think a defense-first concept always ends in failure.
You may think your writing style is just you throwing your opinion out there...and I'm not insulting your writing...it's about as entertaining and generally fair as anything I've ever come across in baseball circles...but sometimes you get stuck in an infinite loop believe you have a key insight and repeating it over and over no matter how hard someone tries to explain why he thinks you're missing something or oversimplifying things.  That's what got me up in arms and caused me to be more blunt than even my usual...when I go 1 vs. 100 on this blog, and the ring-leader of the 100 is the blog owner and the blog owner is speaking in terms just as absolute as mine and then accusing me of being an elitist...yeah...that tends to make me defensive and frustrated.