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The value of hitting in a ballgame is equal to the value of pitching plus defense.  Offense is the most important of the three.
Pitching and defense seem to be interrelated... you can't value them separately, because they affect one another so strongly.  I think that to say 20 out of 27 outs (or whatever) are entirely defense and not at all pitching... is vastly overstating the situation.  However, I can't tell you if the sliding scale is linear, exponential, or something else.
What I CAN tell you is this:  if your defense is AWESOME... pouring a high percentage of your team's money into pitching is less necessary.  And if your pitching is AWESOME... you get less benefit from your outstanding defenders.
If Cliff Lee gets 5K more per game than our #5 starter, then on those days an infield of Kotchman/Wilson/Figgins and an outfield of Ichiro/Gutierrez gets 4-5 less chances to shine, and their defense becomes proportionally less valuable.  The same would be true of any pitcher with a lower contact rate, I suppose.
I think that a team needs to build up both sides of the pitching/defense half of the game, but not both to the extreme at the expense of offense.  It seems possible that this could be an inefficiency in use of resources.
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Also - diminishing returns in defense will happen, if nowhere else, when two excellent fielders' effective range overlaps.  It will also happen if you examine a 2B who errs on 10% of his throws to first and a 1B who errs when receiving 30% of bad throws to first.  If you replace the 2B with a Gold Glover who errs 5% of the time or the 1B with one who only loses 15% of bad throws... you cut errors in half, and gain back half the runs lost on defense in that transition.  If you get BOTH, however... you don't get the full expression of both of their skills.  The 1B has only 50% of the marginal 'bad throws' to redeem, so his specific subskill is only half as valuable.