Ah, spring training. The solid sound of contact between bat and ball, the crack of a fastball hitting a catcher's mitt, the comforting hum of a computer. Huh? Yep, a computer. Baseball is about stats and stats and computers go together like Anna Nicole Smith and cable "news" shows.

So I was thinking, which usually leads to trouble.

Who was the best fielding team in baseball last year, and more to the point does fielding matter? I don't just want to know. I need to know. I'm a Houston Astro fan and I worry when the Cubs pitching starts to look good. Not Ferguson Jenkins, Ken Holtzman good. Just good enough to turn their hitting into wins. The acquisition of Ted Lilly and Jason Marquis, plus the chances there could finally be a season when body parts don't fall off Kerry Wood and Mark Prior concerns me. But I've gotten myself through the long winter nights thinking bad Cub fielding will offset good Cub pitching.

That Chicago turns routine plays into Marx Brothers routines at Wrigley is an article of baseball faith. Or at least it was until yesterday. I was feeling somewhat faithless (must have been the 67 degree weather in February) and in a fit of baseball apostasy decided to try and reassure myself the Cubs can't field. I wish I hadn't.

Unless you buy one of those $25.95 geek fests written by the deciples of Bill James, you have to sit down and work the math out yourself with spreadsheets. It starts when you ask yourself, "Self, how is fielding measured?" Then your head starts to throb and you decide to walk around the block a couple of times and work on a simpler problem. An hour or so later you have figured out the meaning of life, but still don't know how to statistically measure team fielding. Then it hits you.

"Fielding is the number of times someone hit the ball in the field of play and our team either caught the ball or threw the runner out." I'm sure somebody has already figured this out and written a book about it, but I went ahead and threw last year's team pitching and fielding stats into the byte blender and here is what came out:

San Diego was the best fielding team last season. 68% of the times someone put the ball in play it became an out (or outs). This was followed by-the New York Mets (67%), the San Francisco Giants (66.9%), Houston Astros (66.7%), and (gasp) the Chicago Cubs at 66.6%. The Cubs can field. Gloom descends.

Then I rounded up the usual suspects at the bottom of the list. Only 63.7% of the time a ball was put in play in front of the Pittsburgh Pirates did an out result. Then you crawl up from the baseball gutters past Tampa Bay (63.8%), Kansas City (64.2%), Cleveland (64.2%), and Baltimore (64.4%). You notice a pattern here? Well can the bad fielding team say, as the philosopher poet Bruce Springstein put it-"They's winners and they's losers and I'm south of the line."

As in the case of life itself, once you've found the eggs there come chickens to assert they (not the eggs) came first. In this case there is a very strong relationship between pitching and fielding stats. Yes, the Padres were the best at making plays, but they were also #2 in ERA. Did fielding make the pitchers or was it that Padres pitchers routinely sawed off the bats of opponents who hit weak grounders and popups that made Russell Branyon look like Brooks Robinson?

Then you do what politicians, philosophers, and proponents of a unified global warming theory do when confronted with a question that is not easily answered. You quickly point at something, anything else and yell "Look!"

The "Look!" here is the contradictions where good fielding doesn't bring good pitching along with it, or vice versa. For example-the Giants are #3 in fielding efficiency and #22 in ERA. The hated foe (that's what we Astro fans call the Cubs, or at least that's the thing we can say in public, in private we call them, well nevermind..) was #5 in fielding and #24 in pitching. The Nationals were #7 in fielding, but 28th in ERA.

What do these teams have in common? Felipe Alou, Dusty Baker, and Frank Robinson were all outstanding players in their day who understood the value of fundamentals. Did that experience make them better teachers, or at least managers who required concentration on the field?

At the other extreme you get the Dodgers (8th best pitching, 24th best fielding), the Florida Marlins (9th in ERA, 23rd in fielding efficiency), and the woeful Pirates (30th in fielding and 15th in pitching). What do they have in common? Good young arms who strike out alot of hitters.

The stats do yield up a few other items worth noting. The Milwaukee Brewers gave up doubles or triples on 30% of the base hits in play. The Astros pourous outfield defense gave up the extra base 28.1% of the time, and the Diamondbacks young outfield surrendered it 28%. At the other end (with presumably better outfield defense) were the Rangers (22.1%), Indians (22.3%), and Orioles (23.0%).

Then there is the "botch" percentage. It's the percentage of times there is a wild pitch, passed ball, or balk with men on base. It is largely a pitching stat, but it also reflects the grasp of fundamentals good teams have and bad teams don't. The Angels were far and away the worst (5.6% ratio of "botches" to runners), followed by the Royals (5.0%), and Blue Jays (4.6%). Not surprisingly, the Braves (2.6%) and Cardinals (2.6%) were the best.

And at the end of all this number crunching, a ray of hope for Cub haters. The one fielding stat that is what it appears. Double plays. Make them, you get out of jams and win games. Fail to turn them, you prolong innings and court disaster. The worst team in baseball at turning two was the Cubs at 122, followed by the Nationals (123), and Brewers (126). The three best-Colorado (190), Kansas City (189), and a tie between Boston, the Dodgers, and Texas at 174.

Bring on Marquis, Lilly (who fears a pitcher named Lilly anyway). Send in a healthy Prior (if such a thing exists). I fear nothing the Cubs can bring. They can field, they can pitch, they can even slur out a drunken chorus of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame". But when the going gets tough and they need two, the Cubs will get just one and the natural order of the baseball universe will be restored. I have faith (and stats).