Last week, Grant Brisbee made the very salient point that the Atlanta Braves are essentially akin to a small-market team these days. Since the ballclub has stacked their team with homegrown talent, this has not been a glaring problem in years past, but this offseason we have seen them lose both Brian McCann and Tim Hudson. Which was bad, in a sense — the team has replacements at the ready, even if they might not be as good.

The real problem though — and it is no doubt a good problem — will come two-to-three years down the road. Justin Upton, Jason Heyward and Kris Medlen are set to become free agents following the 2015 season, and the next season, Freddie Freeman and Craig Kimbrel (and Brandon Beachy) are also due to become free agents. It’s pretty unlikely that the ballclub will be able to keep all five (or six, if you count Beachy). So, who should they keep?
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There was what seems like a relatively unremarkable trade today, that went down between the Braves and the Twins. The Twins sent to the Braves one Ryan Doumit, in the last year of his contract. The Braves sent to the Twins one Sean Gilmartin, 23 years old and still in the minors. Doumit is expected to fill some kind of role on Atlanta’s bench. Gilmartin might be a Twins starting rotation candidate down the road. It’s a competitive team maybe exchanging a little longer-term value for a little shorter-term value, and it’s a rebuilding team doing the opposite of that. Perfectly understandable, ordinary trade that does very little to capture the imagination.

There might be something buried here, though, beneath the immediate layers. Something nothing more than statistical, but then numbers are so much of everything. It depends on how Doumit ends up being utilized by the Braves, but there’s a chance this could mark the end of an era, beyond just the era of Doumit playing for Minnesota. On the surface, the trade is mildly interesting. Below the surface, it’s a little bit more so.

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Earlier this year, Bill Petti mentioned in his CLIFFORD work the single largest driver in a player’s wOBA collapse from one year to the next was Z-Contact%. Players that saw their Z-Contact% decline by at least 1.4% had a 1.68 times the odds of seeing their wOBA collapse that season than those that did not experience such a decline.

As with any correlation, nothing is a guarantee. Just because a player improves or declines with any one statistic does not guarantee that the results will behave in lockstep. The five players who saw their Z-Contact% improve the most in 2013 were Gerardo Parra, Everth Cabrera, Brandon Moss, Carlos Santana, and David Murphy. Parra, Cabrera, and Santana saw their wOBA improve by 1, 38, and 20 points respectively while Moss and Murphy’s dropped 33 and 80 points.

It was equally volatile on the other end of the scale. Raul Ibanez‘s Z-Contact% dropped 5.3%, yet his wOBA improved by 19 points. Chris Young‘s Z-Contact% dropped 6.2% from 2012 to 2013 as his wOBA dropped 36 points.  Marlon Byrd’s 6.7% decrease was the third-largest decrease in Z-Contact% in the sample size, yet his wOBA improved an amazing 148 points last season. The two largest declines in Z-Contact% from 2012 to 2013 had one thing in common – a last name.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Boston / Cleveland / Philadelphia / St. Louis.

Batters
Of some interest this offseason will be how various projection systems attend to the quite possibly anomalous Chris Johnson. With nearly 2,000 major-league plate appearances now recorded, Atlanta’s third baseman has a career BABIP of .361 — i.e. about the highest figure one will find from any batter with a sample of that magnitude. ZiPS projects Johnson to record a .338 BABIP in 2014; Oliver and Steamer, .345 and .342, respectively.

Johnson will rely on his batted-ball profile to remain even an average player in 2014, however, it appears. ZiPS projects him to post something between one and two wins — a roughly equivalent total to fellow infielder Dan Uggla, whose 2013 campaign was much less successful. Both players are projected to post nearly league-average offensive lines. Rather, it’s their defensive shortcomings for which they suffer most significantly.

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The author has published a weekly statistical report for the Arizona Fall League each week since its brief season commenced back in October — not necessarily because such a thing is of great utility to prospect analysis, but more because, for those of us not currently present in the Greater Phoenix area, it’s one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league.

What follows is the entirely last statistical report for the AFL, following that league’ championship game this past Saturday.

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The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

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Over the past two weeks, the author has published an entirely premature statistical report and then a slightly less premature one of those for the Arizona Fall League — not necessarily because such a thing is of great utility to prospect analysis, but more because, for those of us not currently present in the Greater Phoenix area, it’s one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league. Moreover, it can serve as a pretense upon which to discuss participants in that league, not unlike Atlanta’s Thomas La Stella.

What follows, then — sans both apology and expertise — is the third edition of this site’s weekly AFL statistical report.

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Tonight, the Atlanta Braves will play the Dodgers with their season on the line. Down 2-1 in the NLDS, the Braves have to win tonight just to force a Game 5 — which would match them up against Clayton Kershaw again, so, yeah, this isn’t a great situation — and are turning to Freddy Garcia in this win-or-go-home game. Yes, the Freddy Garcia who turned 37 yesterday, and has had a season that could charitably be described as adventurous.

He went to spring training with the Padres on a minor league deal, but was cut loose after getting bombed on a regular basis in the Cactus League. The Orioles signed him to a minor league contract a few days later and gave him a month in Triple-A before calling him up at the beginning of May. He responded by throwing 50 disastrous innings, including a 5.77 ERA and 6.73 FIP, which got him sent back to Triple-A at the beginning of July. He hung out in the minors for a few months until the Braves picked him up at the end of August and brought him back to the big leagues when rosters expanded in September.

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“We know we’re going to strike out. That’s just a given with guys who have power. And we have a lot of guys who can hit the ball out of the park. And that kind of goes hand in hand. But you look at some of the studies — and our guys have looked at them — and there’s not a direct correlation with strikeouts and offense.”

— Atlanta general manager Frank Wren, interviewed by Jayson Stark on 2/18/13

This quote comes from Alex Remington’s piece on these very pages back in April. When the Braves finished constructing their roster — a roster similar to what we see now — there were questions as to whether the team would strike out too much to make a run at the postseason. Well, we’ve now reached the postseason, and the Braves are still here. And they’re still striking out too, averaging over 10 Ks a game so far. They also led the NL in home runs, an achievement they were expected to sniff given their lineup. This was kind of the plan from the beginning — strike out a fair amount, but counter that with a good deal of power.

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A little under an hour east of here, rising behind one of the world’s largest free-standing natural monoliths, there lies a peak known as Hamilton Mountain. The trail up passes by a breathtaking waterfall and breathstopping cliffs, and the summit affords magnificent views of the Columbia River Gorge and the Cascade peaks towering beyond. As you head out from the trailhead, there’s only one way to go, passing through shrubs and underneath power lines before entering a forest. Soon, though, one arrives at a junction. There are two paths and a sign with arrows, reading “Difficult” and “More Difficult.” The choice is up to the hiker, but no matter which way you pick, you’re going to get to the top.

Mariano Rivera is retiring, which is going to allow us to re-visit the question of who is the game’s best closer. Not that we couldn’t address the question before, but Rivera was the default response, and sometimes people got emotional if you went another way. Now Rivera has removed himself from the pool, and there’s a small host of current candidates to take his place. Among them are Atlanta’s Craig Kimbrel and Los Angeles’ Kenley Jansen, and statistically it can be hard to tell the two apart. Remarkably, they occupy very similar planes. Remarkably, they get there along two very different paths.

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