Now we all know that defense doesn't mean jack, but just how little jack does it not mean? This is a dirty look at what might be the relative unimportance of defense as compared to actual things that matter.
Here's an example of such a thing, hitting. We all know how important is right? That's right, really important. Look at this handy picture!
Now how might this compare to some wimpy non-existent factor like this theoretical "defense"? Here's a dumb stupid picture that shows how meaningless defense is.
Oh, huh. Well that's odd, the way it looks all correlated like that. Must be a visual distortion. Let's turn to actual correlation, that's surely to show how little defense matters. Now as a refresher, R^2 measures the percentage that one variable is influenced by another.
R^2 OPS+ vs W: 0.36
R^2 DER vs. W: 0.18
Well, imagine that. Looks like DER is roughly half as influential as OPS+ in impacting a team's total wins for a season. That's...that matters.