Andruw Jones was having a brilliant career, that is, until he turned 31 years old. Since that point, he’s barely been a league-average player. He went from an all-time great player, to an iffy hall-of-fame candidate.
Chipper Jones announced in March that he would retire at the season’s end. He cited various reasons for ending his hall-of-fame career and admitted that he was tired of living the baseball lifestyle. Always one to answer questions honestly in an era of generalities, he said that his decision was firm; no matter what, he was done once the Braves’ season ended.
As expected, his steadfastness to that decision has been tested, and reporters frequently ask whether he’s changed his mind. Maybe there’s a point to those questions. After all, Jones has a .379 wOBA and 2.9 WAR right now. And he’s on pace for his best season in four years. He projects to finish the season with a .372 wOBA and 4 WAR, and players don’t generally retire after posting numbers like that.
So where does his final season rank among career-concluding seasons throughout history. Is he truly going out on top?
Last night, on the Sunday Night Baseball telecast of the Atlanta Braves and New York Mets, announcer Dan Shulman facilitated a discussion surrounding relievers and the Cy Young Award.
Quite simply, should Aroldis Chapman and Craig Kimbrel be considered legitimate candidates for the NL Cy Young Award this season?
Relievers possess a difficult time making noise in the Cy Young Award voting because they do not throw nearly as many innings as starting pitchers. Fewer innings equal fewer opportunities to make an impact and provide value to one’s baseball team. This sentiment was largely echoed by Orel Hershiser and Buster Olney on the Sunday Night Baseball broadcast.
The topic of relievers and the Cy Young Award seems to surface annually. This season, however, the conversation has become more earnest because Chapman and Kimbrel are compiling video game numbers on the mound. Just look at how dominant both have been for their respective teams, prior to Sunday’s games:
“As a whole, not specifically regarding potential deals, we need to add a lot of pitching to the system. It’s not enough to have a handful or two. You need waves and waves coming through your system, and we don’t have that. We hardly have even one wave coming, so we need to rebuild a lot of pitching depth.”
–Theo Epstein, July 18, 2012
On Monday night, the Chicago Cubs executed a pair of trades, sending players to both the Braves and the Rangers in exchange for pitching, pitching, pitching. Here’s the breakdown of those trades:
Braves get:
SP Paul Maholm
OF Reed Johnson
Cubs get:
SP Arodys Vizcaino
RP Jaye Champman
***
Rangers get:
C Geovany Soto
Cubs get:
SP Jake Brigham
The Braves trade feels a bit like a fleecing for the Cubs; the Rangers trade is at best a wash. Let us see why.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve written quite a bit this year on trends in pitcher aging, specifically velocity loss and gain. In the last iteration I focused on the odds of pitchers gaining velocity back after a season where their fastball dropped by at least 1 mph.
In that piece I listed a few pitchers to keep your eye on given that their velocity was down from 2011. In June, I wrote about CC Sabathia for ESPN and noted that the big lefty is likely beginning to “age”, as the odds are quite a bit higher that pitchers over the age of 30 do not gain their velocity back once they’ve lost it.
After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that there is of course the chance that these pitchers will gain their velocity back by the end of the year (as I noted in both pieces). We know that, generally speaking, pitchers gain velocity as the season goes on. Temperatures rise, and so too do fastball velocities. If this is the case I wondered at what point in the season we can say with greater certainty that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he is going to throw. Is there a particular month where a velocity decline is more likely to translate to or predict a full season velocity decline?
Read the rest of this entry »
The starting rotation was supposed to be a strength for the Braves, but they instead opened today with just one qualified starter with a sub-4.40 ERA. Ben Sheets has provided a lift two starts into his comeback and Tim Hudson has been his typically reliable self, but Mike Minor, Randall Delgado, and Jair Jurrjens have struggled to varying degrees while Brandon Beachy blew out his elbow. Atlanta remains right in the thick of the playoff hunt despite ranking middle of the pack in rotation ERA and FIP (both 4.04).
In an effort to shore up the staff, the Braves acquired Ryan Dempster from the Cubs this afternoon. It’s unclear what they gave up as of this writing, though Delgado has been rumored. Dave O’Brien, Jon Heyman, and Mark Bowman all deserve some credit in breaking the news. The veteran right-hander has ten-and-five no-trade protected but waived it to join Atlanta. He reportedly did not demand any kind of extension or other compensation to approve the trade, so he gets brownie points for that.
The Braves are four games back of the Nationals in the loss column in the NL East and four games up on a wild-card spot, so they’re right in the thick of the playoff hunt. They’ve survived some terrible pitching performances and injuries thanks to one of the game’s most productive outfields — a unit that ranks third in baseball with 10.5 WAR. Michael Bourn (4.2 WAR), Martin Prado (3.7 WAR) and Jason Heyward (3.5 WAR) all rank among the 15-most-valuable players — and among the eight most-valuable outfielders — so far this season.
Bourn will be a free agent after this season and Heyward is under team control through 2015, so those two are on the opposite ends of the contract spectrum. Prado, 28, is kind of in the middle. He’ll be arbitration-eligible for the third time next season before becoming a free agent 15 months from now. Atlanta is going to try to prevent that from happening… Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated posted the results (in slide-show form, yay!) of recent survey they took asking 228 MLB players to name the most underrated position player in the game. These sorts of things usually generate “interesting” results, and this case was no exception. This is supposed to be a fun exercise, so it would be unfair to complain about the “unscientific” nature of the poll: why 228 players? How were they distributed across the teams? Were they position players themselves or a mix? How many votes did each player get? The notions of “underrated” and is itself vague (underrated by the media? The fans? Statistics?), so the respondents may have been thinking of different things when answering. Wouldn’t a truly underrated player fail to show up on a list of “top underrated players” at all?
Such complaints sort of miss the point. I assume this was simply meant to be a fun way to generate discussion. I personally would have liked to have seen one or two comments from respondents about each player to get a sense of what the respondents were thinking about when they answered. In any case, the list has some results that are pretty hilarious, as one might expect. One way of responding would be to come up with a different list. Grant Brisbee wrote up an excellent list of his own. Another would be to simply go through SI’s list and comment on it.
This post takes the second path, but the truth is, it is not quite the “fisking” one might expect. Yes, some choices are downright hilarious. However, given the qualifications above, I thought the responding players did okay. It is not the list I would have made, but they made some decent choices. Or maybe the list is like the movie Juno: the beginning is so horribly annoying that the rest seems better than it actually is.
Like many teams across Major League Baseball this season, the Atlanta Braves’ starting rotation got bitten by the injury bug. The ace of their rotation, right-hander Brandon Beachy, underwent Tommy John surgery — as did prized prospect Arodys Vizcaino. Both will not return before the end of the season.
The pitching depth that Atlanta had accumulated was supposed to help weather the storm, but the results have been underwhelming. That has forced Atlanta to look elsewhere for a starting pitcher. Preferring the least-expensive route, the organization did not turn to the trade market and instead signed former All-Star Ben Sheets to a minor-league deal.
On Sunday afternoon, Sheets made his first major-league start since 2010 and dominated the New York Mets over six scoreless innings. He struck out five and only walked one, generating ten whiffs over an 88-pitch outing. In many ways, it was like watching the old Ben Sheets on the mound.
In one particular aspect, though, it was very much a different Ben Sheets.
With yet another day to go before actual baseball returns to the field, I thought I would take a quick look at some of the potential MVP candidates in both leagues based on the first half of the season.
Identifying MVP candidates is certainly not a straightforward process, nor is the criteria universally agreed upon. Knowing this I will not begin or end this article with any claim to have identified the “proper” candidates. These are my candidates based on my way of looking at the term “valuable”.
So what is my criteria? Well, I like to think of MVPs as players that provide an exceptional amount of production in both an absolute and relative sense. This means identifying players that lead or are close to leading the league in production, but where there is also a sizable gap between their production and that of the second best player on their own team. This means that I do tend to discount great performances by players that happen to share the same uniform as equally great players. Is it their fault? Absolutely not. In fact, those players could likely be the best all around players in the entire league. But when it comes to value I think there is a relative component that should be considered. This isn’t to necessarily give credit to the player (i.e. they don’t “step it up” to make up for the gap in talent on the team), but rather to the performance itself.
Like I said, this is my criteria and I don’t claim that it should trump all others, nor would I say it is complete on it’s own. Rather, I think it’ a useful starting place.
Okay, enough with the preamble. Let’s get to the data.