Chipper’s Company

by
May 30, 2008

Coming into play yesterday Braves third baseman Chipper Jones sported a .418/.495/.674 slash line, thanks in large part to his 77 hits in 184 at bats. In an 8-1 win over Milwaukee last night, Jones went 2-4 with two walks, raising his numbers to .420/.500/.670. Make no mistake: Chipper is playing out of his mind right now and doing much of the gruntwork in preventing the Braves from getting off to a terrible start. However, he is not the only player in recent history to get off to such a torrid start.

Trent McCotter, in a Retrolist message, passed along the following five instances of a player starting his season 77-184, or better:

Andres Galarraga, 1993: 80-184, .435/.462/.701, 1.163 OPS
Rod Carew, 1983: 79-184, .427/.473/.535, 1.008 OPS
Lenny Dykstra, 1990: 77-184, .418/.486/.546, 1.032 OPS
Paul O’Neill, 1994: 77-184, .418/.511/.703, 1.214 OPS
Todd Helton, 2000: 77-184, .418/.511/.815, 1.326 OPS

Pretty impressive stuff. Trent also acknowledged that this did not take into account years when a good amount of play by play files are missing so there may be others not mentioned here.

Curious about what happened from here I looked at the overall numbers of these players as well as what happened from their 185th at bat on. Here are their numbers starting with at bat #185 (their season totals in parentheses):

Andres Galarraga: 94-286, .329/.366/.538 (.370/.403/.602)
Rod Carew: 81-287, .282/.370/.331 (.339/.409/.411)
Lenny Dykstra: 115-406, .283/.386/.390 (.325/.418/.441)
Paul O’Neill: 54-188, .295/.408/.503 (.359/.460/.603)
Todd Helton: 139-396, .351/.440/.644 (.372/.463/.698)

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While all five posted OPS counts over 1.000 during their 77-184 “streak” just Helton kept it up during his post-hot start plate appearances. On average, these five guys posted a .310 BA onwards from their scorching start. If Chipper were to hit .310 for the rest of the season, assuming his total number of at bats will be in the same range as the last few years, he would go 97 for his next 312, putting him at 174-496 to finish the season; that would be a .351 batting average.

Realistically, and with regards to this small group, Chipper has two options:

a) sustain a BA higher than .351 from last night to the end of the season, giving him the highest BA of the group (Helton hit .351 for the rest of his season after starting out .418, giving him a .372 for the season)
b) begin to regress, finishing the season with a tremendous slash line albeit not nearly as impressive as .418/.495/.674.

It is not very likely Chipper will finish the year with a BA over or around .400 based either on this evidence or our own intuition; however that does not, in any way, make what he is currently doing any less remarkable. We all tend to understand how difficult it is to sustain a .400+ batting average primarily because nobody has done so in recent years and Chipper is at the point of difficulty right now where a 2-5 night actually decreases the average.

Still, a large part of me is hoping he can somehow pull it off as it would be great for baseball.





 

Eric is an accountant and statistical analyst from Philadelphia. He also covers the Phillies at Phillies Nation and can be found here on Twitter.

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