After more than 17 years as a fixture in Atlanta Braves baseball, Chipper Jones has announced that he will retire as a player after the 2012 season. His $7 million club option for next year would have vested at $9 million with 123 games played this summer, but apparently enough is enough.
The recent spat of injury news continued this morning, when the Braves announced that RHP Arodys Vizcaino was undergoing Tommy John surgery and will miss the entire 2012 season. Vizciano was rated the #2 prospect in the Braves system by Marc Hulet, and despite being just 21-years-old, he was in the mix for a Major League job at some point in 2012. While the Braves certainly have the pitching depth to deal with not having him on the mound this year, this is still a blow to the organization.
And, while no decision will likely be made on this until after Vizcaino rehabs, there’s a decent chance that this answers the lingering “starter or reliever” question that has followed Vizciano around. His two-pitch repertoire and big time fastball suggested a career in the bullpen may be in his future, but the Braves continued to let him start in Double-A last season before having him pitch in relief in Triple-A and the Majors. Even putting aside any durability questions this injury raises – in conjunction with the elbow soreness he experienced in 2010, his long term health has to be a concern – the lost year of development probably tips the scales towards a career in relief. He’s a guy who needed as much time on the mound as possible to continue developing his repertoire if he was going to stick as a starter, but losing the entire 2012 season is going to make it difficult for the Braves to keep him in that role.
More likely, Vizciano will return to the mound next year and be told to just prepare for a career of 15 pitch outings. Hopefully, for his sake, that task proves less strenuous on his arm.
With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.
League Trends
To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.
With a glaring hole at shortstop, the Atlanta Braves are poised to hand the position over to an untested rookie who has consistently exceeded scouts’ expectations. Tyler Pastornicky worked his way up through the Braves’ system, peaking with a .314/.359/.414 line across two levels in 2011. But while Pastornicky looks like the man for 2012, he has a top-flight prospect right on his heels as Andrelton Simmons enters his third professional season and could be ready for the big leagues next year.
Simmons was the Braves second-round pick in the 2010 draft while Pastornicky was a fifth-rounder for the Blue Jays in 2008. The Braves got Pastornicky as part of the Yunel Escobar trade in 2010. Despite being drafted two years apart, both Pastornicky and Simmons will play the entire 2012 season at 23-years old.
The physical differences between the two players is noticeable. Pastornicky is slightly undersized at 5-foot-11, 170 pounds and he mirrors the description of a scrappy middle infielder. While Simmons is also on the thin side, his 6-foot-2 frame offers a little more projection and the added physicality that scouts prefer. Read the rest of this entry »
Take the best available player.
That refrain continues to be the draft philosophy espoused by all thirty major league organizations throughout each summer. It does not matter if the player is 18-years-old and in high school or if the player is 21-years-old and in college. Simply evaluate the talent on the field and draft accordingly. As Mariners’ scouting director Tom McNamara stated last June in preparation for the 2011 Draft:
“If we think the high school player is the best player at No. 2, we’ll take the high school guy. If we think it’s a college guy, we’ll take the college guy.” (source)
Seattle eventually selected collegiate left-hander Danny Hultzen with the second pick in the draft. In 2010, Seattle selected prep right-hander Taijuan Walker in the supplemental first round, which happened to be their first and only first-round pick of the draft. The year before, they had three first-round picks and selected one collegiate player and two high school players.
Echoing the best player available approach, the Mariners have not shown preference toward high school or college. In fact, the organization has drafted seven prep players and six collegiate players since the 2000 Draft. Essentially an even split.
All organizations are not like this, though. I gathered all of the first-round draft picks (including the first supplemental round) since the turn of the century, and noticed a few trends that have developed.
With Spring Training approaching the Atlanta Braves claim to have put their historic 2011 collapse behind them. Unlike their brethren in collapse — the Boston Red Sox — the Braves made very few changes to the team or baseball organization in the wake of the collapse. Significant off-season transactions were limited to the firing of rookie hitting coach Larry Parrish, trading Derek Lowe to the Indians in a salary dump, and allowing shortstop Alex Gonzalez to leave as a free-agent and replacing him with Jack Wilson (and Tyler Pastornicky, as noted below).
The lack of moves by the Braves stands in contrast to the rest of the N.L. East where all of the other teams made major moves. The Marlins, Phillies, and Nationals all added major pieces through the free-agent market, while the Mets cut payroll and allowed Jose Reyes to move to the Marlins. While claiming to have an open mind about adding players later in the Spring, Braves GM Frank Wren seems to be betting that the Braves will be competitive without a major addition, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Mark Bradley:
If everyone bounces back, then we’ve got a good ballclub that doesn’t have a major need.
In essence, Wren is betting on regression to the mean. Hoping that players who struggled last year will revert to their normal performance level. In 2011 the Braves were generally quite good at preventing run, as there 605 runs allowed was second in the N.L. behind the Phillies. Scoring runs was the problem for the Braves, as they finished 10th in the N.L. with 641 runs scored. At what positions can the Braves expect increased offensive production this year?
For a catcher, the “tools of ignorance” is an endearing term used to sum up the challenges of the position in a neat and tidy phrase. Over the past three seasons, scouting well over 100 games and a few hundred prospects has led me to develop my own “tools of magnificence” as a handful of players have displayed 80-grade tools which are now seared into my scouting conscious.
While playing competitive baseball the summer before I started high school I had a teammate named “Rusty” who always wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Although he was the best hitter on the team he was constantly bombarded with ridicule because of his choice of chapeau. Atlanta was the bottom feeder in the National League and was coming off a 65-97 season, which saw them finish at least fifth in the six-team division for the sixth straight season. A funny thing happened in 1991, though. Atlanta got good. And stayed good for… well until today. The success of the organization has revolved around its ability to maintain strong pitching and currently has three of the best pitching prospects in the game – and that trio could be MLB-ready by the end of 2012. The minor league system also boasts some intriguing up-the-middle offensive talents.
1. Julio Teheran, RHP
BORN: Jan. 27, 1991
EXPERIENCE: 4 seasons
ACQUIRED: 2007 international free agent
2010-11 TOP 10 RANKING: 1st
Teheran leads the charge for Atlanta’s young arms. He attacks hitters with an explosive repertoire that screams future No. 1 starter… if he can polish one of his two breaking balls. His fastball, which can touch 96-97 mph, and changeup are both plus pitches at times and just need more consistency. Teheran has both above-average control and understanding of his craft for his age. He is a fly-ball pitcher but he does a nice job of keeping the ball in the park after allowing just five home runs in 144.2 innings at triple-A. Despite a strong changeup, Teheran struggled against left-handed batters (at least in comparison to right-handed hitters who hit .199) by allowing a .276 batting-average-against. He just recently turned 21 years old and already has 20 innings of big league experience under his belt. Atlanta has excellent pitching depth at the big league level so Teheran should receive some more seasoning at the triple-A level to begin 2012.
After gaining significant helium during the 2010 off-season, prospect followers expected young left-hander Carlos Perez to firmly establish himself as the best of the next wave of young Braves pitchers. With Randall Delgado, Arodys Vizcaino, Julio Teheran and Mike Minor in the midst of breaking through at the Major League level, along with prospect fallout from the Michael Bourn deal, a void between what’s now and what’s next has developed.
By statistical measures, Carlos Perez had a marginally successful 2011 at best. Over 126 innings, he struck out nearly eight batters per nine innings and proved to be a durable starter whose innings needed to be monitored closely the final two months of the 2011 season to avoid overuse. Unfortunately, Perez also surrendered more hits than innings pitched and his poor walk rates led to the worst WHIP among qualified pitchers in the South Atlantic League.
Video after the jump
It is a simple question.
What is sabermetrics?
Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?
Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.
Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.
I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.
Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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