E-Mail This Article to a Friend For whom the Bellhorn tolls It tolls for thee BY RYAN STEWART

There were once 25. Now only 14 remain.

I don’t need to name names. Everyone around these parts knows who’s still here from the 2004 team, and we all know who’s gone.

It would be nice to keep them all, but that’s the reality of the baseball business: every team has a budget to work with, and last year the market went a little haywire. Still, even prudent budgeting can’t anticipate performance issues.

Which brings us to the topic at hand: the fate of one Mark Christian Bellhorn, starting second basemen for the ’04 Red Sox, and, until recently, the starter in ’05 as well. Of all the former members of the champs, Bellhorn was the most divisive figure among members of the nation. People either loved him or hated him. There was no in-between. When he was supplanted as a starter by Tony Graffanino, some hailed the move; others thought it was a shameful showing by the team’s front office. Some said Bellhorn’s numbers spoke for themselves, others said that people weren’t looking at the right numbers.

It plays out as the representative argument for what is becoming a deeper and deeper divide in baseball: the battle between statheads and traditionalists. The statheads are the guys who can trot out a series of numbers a mile long to back up most arguments, no matter how seemingly ludicrous. The traditionalists believe there’s only one way to evaluate baseball players — by watching them.

For the 2004 World Champs, Bellhorn batted .264 with 17 homers, 82 RBIs, 88 walks, and an .817 OPS (on-base average plus slugging percentage). All very good numbers for a second baseman. He also struck out 177 times. Not good for any position.

Enter Eric Van. Van, a baseball fan and stat geek, posed a simple question: were strikeouts really that bad? In other words, were they worse than any other out? Traditional logic holds that yes, they are worse: putting the ball in play could move along runners, lead to errors, and, in general, help you score more runs than strikeouts.

Van wasn’t so sure. He exchanged all Bellhorn’s Ks for other types of outs, throwing in the occasional hit based on his batting average on balls put in play. After all these calculations were made, Van reasoned that against an average defense, if Bellhorn were to put the ball in play instead of striking out, the difference in runs scored for the Red Sox would essentially be zero. Times Bellhorn moved the runners along were then balanced out by grounding into double plays. Errors would theoretically be made too infrequently to really make a difference. In fact, Van believed, Bellhorn’s propensity to swing and miss was beneficial in that it helped increase a pitcher’s pitch count, leading to a swifter call to the bullpen.

Van’s creative thinking helped land him a job with the Red Sox front office as a statistician. Bellhorn kept his job through 2004 and came up with some key home runs in the post-season. The combination of Van’s study and Bellhorn’s clutch post-season homers was enough for some fans to feel the latter should keep his job.

But if Bellhorn’s less-visible stats were so great, how to explain his struggles this year? Through 85 games in 2005, Bellhorn was batting a puny .218 with a meager .688 OPS and, not surprisingly, 109 strikeouts. Even whipping boy Kevin Millar has a better line than that.

Traditionalists are glad Bellhorn’s gone. Statheads hope he gets another shot with the team. Neither side has much use for the other.

The truth about Bellhorn probably lies somewhere in the middle. Anyone who watched most games this year saw that he looked overmatched in many at-bats, to the point where it seemed as if pitchers were speeding through the line-up just to get to him — almost as though he were a pitcher in the ninth spot in the NL. He came through with a couple of big hits here and there, but for the most part he seemed to be praying for walks. Then again, it’s not like the team was stumbling badly with him in the line-up. He was also above average defensively, he had a good attitude, and he never complained. The Sox probably could have stuck with him and taken a chance on his getting hot down the stretch again like he did last year. But with Graffanino and Alex Cora playing so well, why should they?

But those who support their argument that the Sox did the wrong thing simply by pulling out a stat sheet are no less shortsighted than those who think Bellhorn’s frequent whiffs mean he was contributing nothing. Sure, some of those strikeouts were no-harm, no-foul. But just as many were rally-killers when a well-placed groundball or fly ball could’ve advanced the runners and kept the rally going. The conclusion is that neither side shows the complete puzzle, and, at the end, only the front office has access to that.

Hey, I love Bellhorn. He had style, and I’ll always remember the home run in the first game of the World Series. If I ever see him on the street, I’ll offer to buy him a beer (although I suspect he favors a different vice). But shipping him off was the right decision. And I don’t care what stats you cherry-pick to suggest otherwise.

"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Ryan Stewart can be reached at rstewart[a]phx.com.