Joe Maddon’s defensive analysis always seems to make news.

Last offseason the Tampa Bay manager told WEEI.com’s Alex Speier that Adrian Beltre might be the best defender he’s ever witnessed. (Maddon since altered his view after breaking down Beltre’s performance this season.) Now he is going on record as saying that his collection of second basemen are tops when it comes to looking at which team has the best defense at the position.

The combination of Sean Rodriguez, Reid Brignac, and Ben Zobrist has Maddon offering this analysis:

“I’m here to tell you I’ve often said this year that I think Sean is possibly the best second baseman I’ve seen all year in this league, and I’m not going to back off on that, I believe that,” Maddon told Marc Topkin of the St. Petersburg Times. “Our other guy is right behind him, and if you put Zorilla out there there’s not a whole big dropoff there. … We have had nothing but great second base play this year.”

Maddon continued, explaining why a Gold Glove might not be coming any of the Tampa Bay fielders’ way.

“The Gold Glove to me a lot of times is an offensive award, so with that I can talk all I want about it,” Maddon said. “But I’m telling you, if you think about it, (Robinson) Cano plays a good second base in New York and he’s there every day, (Boston’s Dustin) Pedroia‘s good, but on a night-by-night basis, nobody exceeds our play at second base.”

While we understand that certain stats sometimes don’t paint the whole picture when talking about defense, it should be noted that Tampa Bay’s second basemen this season are seventh in the American League in fielding percentage with seven errors. They do, however, have the AL’s best zone rating at the position (.863).

As Pedroia said this offseason on The Laser Show, “I don’t really know how the zone stuff works … I don’t know where these zone ratings come from … As a baseball player we don’t tend to read into zone ratings on how we win ballgames.”