Sunday Notes: Was Jim Edmonds Better Than Andruw Jones?
Who was better, Jim Edmonds or Andruw Jones?
I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week, expecting that it would be a close call. Centerfielders both, they played 17 seasons each and finished with similar WAR totals (Jones 67, Edmonds 64.5). Making the comparison especially intriguing was the fact that one was clearly the better defender, while the other was clearly the better hitter.
Instead of a nail-biter, I got a landslide. A total of 4,017 people voted, and a resounding 71.4% opted for Jones. Edmonds, despite having a huge edge in wRC+, garnered a meager 28.6%.
My eyebrows raised a full inch when I unearthed these statistical comps:
Edmonds had a career 132 wRC+. So did Wade Boggs, George Brett, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Todd Helton, and Billy Williams (among others).
Jones had a 111 wRC+. So did Russell Branyan, Bernard Gilkey, Geoff Jenkins, Adam Lind, Hal Morris, and Neil Walker (among others).
The above isn’t meant to disparage Jones. He had some very good seasons with the bat, particularly in the power department. Seven seasons with 30-plus home runs — including one with 51 — is nothing to sneeze at. More than anything, what the comps suggest is that Edmonds was a better hitter than many people realize. He was an elite hitter.
It’s stating the obvious to say that Jones was an elite defender. The eye test told you that, and if you look at the numbers you’ll see them nodding back in agreement. One could reasonably argue that Jones — prior to falling off a cliff after the age of 30 — was the best ever at fielding his position.
Their peaks were a veritable dead heat. Jones’s best two-season WAR total was 14.6 (in 1999-2000). Edmonds best two-season WAR total was 14.6 (in 2002-2004). Comparing their primes is fuzzier. Edmonds had a six-year stretch where his WAR ranged between 6.1 and 8.3. Jones cant’t match that level of consistency, but he did have three seasons with 7-plus WAR — this over an eight-year-stretch — while Edmonds had just one season with more than 7 WAR.
Is the aforementioned defensive edge enough to elevate Jones over Edmonds in a “Who was better?” debate? The 4,000-plus people who voted in the poll apparently think so. Whether you agree or not, both have a legitimate Hall of Fame case… which isn’t to say the electorate at hand concurs. Jones has gained little traction, and Edmonds — the wholly under-appreciated Edmonds — was flat out snubbed in his lone year on the ballot.
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The most brain-dead and pointless of the new rules being introduced to MLB this season addresses two-way players. It goes as follows:
In order to appear as a pitcher without counting toward a club’s pitcher limit, a player must accrue both at least 20 Major League innings pitched and at least 20 games started (as either a position player or designated hitter) with at least three plate appearances in each of those games, in either the current season or previous season. The only way a position player not designated as a two-way player can pitch in a game is if his team is winning or losing by seven or more runs, or if the game goes to extra innings.
Shohei Ohtani is the only player who currently qualifies. Michael Lorenzen, coming off a season where he pitched in 73 games, played the outfield in 29 more, and pinch hit seven times, does not qualify. Sorry, Michael, not enough starts at a position other than pitcher. The appropriate acronym here would be SMH.
Which brings us to Jake Cronenworth. The 26-year-old infielder ranks ninth on our Padres Top Prospects list, and he likewise possesses two-way talent. Acquired by San Diego from Tampa Bay in December as part of the Tommy Pham–Hunter Renfroe deal, Cronenworth not only slashed .334/.429/.520 at Triple-A Durham, he made seven pitching appearances and threw seven-and-a-third scoreless innings.
He’d been a two-way player at the University of Michigan. In three years with the Wolverines, Cronenworth logged a 2.76 ERA while also excelling with the bat. The Rays selected him in the seventh round of the 2015 draft as a second baseman.
Despite his live arm and success toeing the rubber, Croneneworth doesn’t aspire to be a true two-way player. At least that was his public face when I talked to him in Padres camp last month.
“I was drafted as a position player, and I’ve played as a position player since 2015,” Cronenworth told me. “Last year, when we decided to start going the two-way route, I thought it might give me an extra inch forward over other guys — it might make my opportunity better — but at the end of the day, I’m a position player first and a pitcher second.”
When he does take the mound, Cronenworth throws two- and four-seam fastballs, a cutter, and a curveball. His heater has some juice. Low-90s in his final Big Ten season, he was “probably 93-96” last year in Durham.
But again, he views pitching as a secondary endeavor.
“You want to be the best at both, but it’s hard at a level like this when you have guys who are position players only and that’s all they’re working on,” said Cronenworth. “That’s why I say I’m a position player first. The things I do from that standpoint are always going to trump the pitching side.”
Which is probably just as well. For reasons difficult to fathom, MLB’s decision-makers have decided they don’t like two-way players. SMH.
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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS
Coco Crisp went 2 for 2 against Radhames Liz.
Liz Funk went 2 for 4 against Belve Bean.
Joe Lis went 2 for 6 against Vida Blue.
Lil Stoner went 2 for 8 against Eddie Rommel.
Lip Pike went 2 for 12 against Phonney Martin.
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This past Monday marked the 20th anniversary of Chris Mehring’s first broadcast of a Wisconsin Timber Rattlers game. Two decades later, he remains the play-by-play voice of the Milwaukee Brewers’ Midwest League affiliate (as well as the steward of the Rattler Radio blog). Learning that he’d attained a milestone, I reached out to see if Mehring would share a few anecdotes from his time in the booth. Ever gracious, he was happy to oblige.
“In my first year with the Rattlers (2000), I worked with Greg Hofer and we would switch play-by-play every few innings,” Mehring recalled via email. “Greg was calling the play-by-play one night and the door to the radio booth opened. A young lady walked in with a beer in her hand, and was acting like she’d been in there before, so I didn’t say anything. She winds up sitting down on my lap to watch the game. Greg just kept calling the game. I thought he knew her, so I continued to not say anything.
“Larry Trucco was our GM at the time, and he walks in the booth.
‘Young lady! Do you belong in here?’
‘Nnnooo…’
‘Then, get out!”
She gets up and leaves.
Greg turns to me after the inning is over and goes, ‘I thought you knew her.’
I really thought I was going to get fired before my first season was done.”
***
“In either 2008 or 2009, the Rattlers were playing the Cedar Rapids Kernels and Ron “Roady” Plein was still traveling with them as their clubhouse manager. Roady would dress in full uniform and chase after foul balls, or pitches that got to the backstop with no one on base. After a few times of seeing this, our batboy started chasing after pitches to the backstop, too. It became a race to get to the baseball first. The crowd started to get into the competition.
“They almost collided going after a ball. The very next pitch went back to the wall and the race was on again. This time they did collide. The batboy flew over Roady and was okay. Roady did not get up, because he had broken an ankle. The game was delayed for over 30 minutes to stabilize him, get an ambulance to the area behind home plate, and get him off the field.
“The production crew told me they had video of Roady’s foot just hanging there and called it worse than the Joe Theismann injury. I’m pretty sure we deleted that video. I haven’t seen it since that night.”
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NEWS NOTES
Emily Messina is the new radio voice of the Reading Fightin Phils, Philadelphia’s Eastern League affiliate. A graduate of Catholic University, Messina spent last season as a press box manager, and fill-in broadcaster, for the Lynchburg Hellcats. Here resume includes time with the Australian Baseball League’s Melbourne Aces.
Pittsburgh Pirates left-hander Steven Brault has recorded an album of show tunes. Information on “A Pitch From Broadway” can be found here.
This year’s national SABR convention — the 50th annual — has been rescheduled. It will be held at the Hyatt Regency Inner Harbor, in Baltimore, from July 14-18, 2021.
Per old friend Kiley McDaniel, the Atlanta Braves notified their full-time and part-time employees on Friday that they would be paid through May 31. They are the first known MLB club to give their employees assurances beyond the end of April or beginning of May.
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A Midwest League game was broadcast a few nights ago. Not a ‘real’ game, course. Those won’t be taking place until the pandemic wreaking havoc on both the sports world and our daily lives is in the rear-view mirror. What we had — this on what would have been opening night for the Lansing Lugnuts and West Michigan Whitecaps — was ‘fauxpening day.’ Dan Hasty and Jesse Goldberg-Strassler were the masterminds.
The idea was hatched when Hasty, the radio voice of the Whitecaps, suggested the two teams meet in a game played by the roll of the dice. Literally. Hasty and Goldberg-Strassler, the voice of the Lugnuts, put together predicted 2020 starting lineups for each team, added a few hurlers, then hooked up via Zoom to do nine innings of play-by-play while simulating a game via Baseball Dice Roller.
Hasty and his normal broadcaster parter, Mike Coleman, called the Whitecaps at bats. Goldberg-Strassler and his partner, Adam Jaska, called the Lugnuts at bats. They described more than just balls in play. Just as they would in a ‘normal’ game — and it truly sounded realistic — they voiced balls and strikes, presented stats and information, and engaged in broadcast banter.
Once the ‘game’ was over, Goldberg-Strassler mixed in the hum of the crowd, pop-of-the-mitt and crack-of-the-bat sounds, and cheering (ditto a bit of booing; they pulled no punches in trying to replicate ‘real’). He sent that to Hasty, who added the final touches. Radio-ready, the ‘game’ then aired on Thursday.
The Lugnuts came out on top 7-5. Leonardo Jimenez, the No. 19 prospect on our Blue Jays list, led the way with three hits, including a triple and a home run. Parker Meadows, No. 11 on our Tigers list, singled, doubled, and homered.
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A piece of Al Kaline trivia on the weekend following his death at age 85:
The Tigers were tied with the Red Sox for first place in the AL East on September 21, 1972. Kaline, 37 years old at the time, went on to slash .512/.523/.878 over his last 10 games. Moreover, he went 10 for 19 against Boston pitchers during that stretch. Detroit won the division.
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I’m currently reading Jane Leavy’s The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and World He Created and to little surprise, the prose is every bit as good as the research (which was extensive). Here is Leavy describing Christy Walsh, who handled Ruth’s affairs and is considered by many to have been baseball’s first agent:
“He looked like he was born responsible. His birthday suit was probably three-piece. His slick-backed black hair might have been parted with a nun’s ruler… Walsh was a teetotaler and, to be polite about it, extremely careful with his money — and Ruth’s. Ruth wasn’t careful about anything.”
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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE
SportsNet Canada’s David Singh wrote about how the mentorship of a former big-league hurler helped sent Mike Soroka on course for MLB stardom.
Twins manager Rocco Baldelli is a music aficionado who has seen Phish in concert close to 40 times. Jim Souhan talked to Baldelli about his favorite non-baseball subject for The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
The Athletic’s Rustin Dodd wrote about erstwhile Cincinnati Reds infielder Billy Bates (who once raced a cheetah), and other players who enjoyed meteoric success.
MiLB.com’s Alexis Brudnicki talked to scouting legend Ron Rizzi (now a special assistant to the GM for the Nationals), who considers Brian Tayler the best pitcher he ever saw.
Former Tennessee Titans safety Myron Rolle is now a neurosurgery resident treating COVID-19 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital. Nora Princiotti shared his story at The Boston Globe.
WBUR’s “Only A Game” showcased Scott Radinsky, whose dual careers have long been pitching and punk rock.
RANDOM FACTS AND STATS
Carlos Quentin came to the plate 3,247 times and was hit by a pitch 127 times.
Mark Lemke came to the plate 3,654 times and was never hit by a pitch.
Stan Musial played in 3,026 games and had 12,718 plate appearances.
Eddie Murray played in 3,026 games and had 12,817 plate appearances.
Johnny Mize hit three home runs in a game six times. His team lost four of the six, while another ended in a tie.
Six Hall of Famers played no more than five seasons with any one team: Roberto Alomar (Toronto Blue Jays), Dan Brouthers (Buffalo Bisons), John Clarkson (Boston Beaneaters), Tommy McCarthy (Beaneaters), Old Hoss Radbourn (Providence Grays), and Deacon White (Bisons.) All but Alomar played in the 1880s. (List per @JamesSmyth621)
Pete Runnels got his first stolen base on June 30, 1953. It was his 17th career attempt. The Washington Senators infielder was 0-for-3 in 1951, 0-for-10 in 1952, and was thrown out in his first three attempts in 1953. (Per @baseballtwit)
Bob Feller had a 17-strikeout game at age 17. He had an 18-strikeout game at age 19.
Alex Johnson won the American League batting title in 1970 while playing for the California Angels. His brother, Ron Johnson, rushed for over 1,000 yards with the New York Giants that same year.
On this date in 1960, the Detroit Tigers acquired Norm Cash from the Cleveland Indians in exchange for Steve Demeter. Cash went on to hit 373 home runs and log a 139 wRC+ over the next 17 seasons. Demeter went on to play just four more big-league games.
On April 14, 1941. Bud Sketchley recorded the first of his seven career hits in a 3-0 White Sox loss to the St. Louis Browns. Sketchley is one of five players in MLB history born in the province of Manitoba. The others are Russ Ford, Gene Ford, Mel Kerr, and Corey Koskie.
Frank Mountain and Buttercup Dickerson played for the National League’s Troy Trojans in 1880.
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
David, this column is amazing in normal times; it’s a gift to us all right now! I’m buying that Brault album!
Thanks for continuing to share the insights and weirdness you’ve come across.
I’m getting Brault’s album also. I’m not sure how his singing is, and I don’t tend to like show-tunes, but I’ll enjoy it .
Steven Brault is one of the only players who wears a NOKONA glove. Nokkna is the only remaining baseball glove maker in the USA. The most American thing a person can own (rivaled perhaps by an American flag or a Harley) is their baseball glove.
No, I do not work for Nokona. But it is the only glove I get for my kids, and the only glove I wear as a coach and as a dad. My kids all have multiple Nokonas – and for Christmas they always get a custom Nokona.
Now more than ever, please support NOKONA. It is a small but great company in Nocona, TX. They make by far the best gloves in the world. And they make every single one of them in Texas!
And if you have not done so already, please become a Fangraphs member.
NOKONA glove is by a huge margin the best glove I’ve ever had too. Worth the price premium.
I somewhat believe you but it would be hard to get me to de-commit from a lifetime of Wilson A-2000 usage.
You didn’t ask which of Jones or Edmonds was the better hitter, you asked which was better. You can’t just wave away how much better he was defensively. Historical defensive data may not be great, but he was more than 100 RAR better than the second best OF ever by RAR, some guy named Willie Mays. The difference between Jones and Mays is about the same as the difference between Mays and the 30th best defensive outfielder of all time. His defensive edge over Edmonds was about 200 RAR – about the same as Edmonds offensive edge over him. Which is why they have similar WAR.
You clearly did not watch Edmonds defensively on a regular basis. Defensive numbers are notoriously terrible and unreliable. Jones was a great defender but I don’t buy that he was 100 runs better as a defender than anyone else who has ever played center. I also don’t buy him being 15 to 20 runs better than Edmonds a year.
You clearly did not watch Jones defensively on a regular basis. Everything hit in the air in the middle of the field was simply hopeless. (I was not a Braves fan.) He was less spectacular than Edmonds because he always seemed to have already arrived at wherever the ball was going to be.
to be fair Edmonds kinda blends in with the crowd at Busch, you’d be surprised too if it looked like some rando they picked out of it could shag routine flies.
I look forward to the level of discourse from Cards fans when Molina is up for the HoF if this is what we get when Edmonds is up.
This guy right here gets it.
They are only unreliable in that they don’t track actual performance closely enough to be relied on from year to year. They have high variability. There’s not really another way in which they’re terrible. Which is to say: they’re pretty good cumulatively, but you have to take the long view.
And yes, Edmonds was a very good defender. This is precisely what the numbers you don’t like say about him. But Jones was, as the article and MikeS point out, arguably the greatest defensive outfielder of all time, possibly by an unfathomable amount. That’s true in the numbers, but it’s even truer in the eye test. Nobody ever took better routes to the ball than Jones, and he was a top-tier athlete along with that.
None of this changes that Jim Edmonds was one of the most underrated players of his era. He was a top 40 position player throughout his time in Anaheim, and then became a top-15 player for his first six years in St. Louis. It’s hard to elevate your game like that; it’s harder still to already be awesome and then elevate it more.
David’s point is they both deserved more consideration, and I agree.
No, we’ve always known that we don’t have any accurate way to track defensive numbers in the same way as offensive metrics like wOBA and wRC+. Every single defensive metric is significantly flawed in some way!
Also, Jones may have had better range, but Edmonds was just as perfect at taking routes to the ball.
….show your work. You’re arguing for bias. If the data collection are bad, they’re bad, but equally bad for everyone, and the variance matters less over time by simple rules of aggregation. It makes it (arguably but not actually impossible) hard to compare ACROSS positions, but not within positions, where the errors affect everyone equally (Kruschke has a really good example of this in his textboon on Bayesian methods). You’re basically arguing that DRS or whatever is biased to favor jones, which hasn’t ever been the argument behind arguing those systems are flawed- it’s that in the short term the data are too noisy to analyze.
Six Ten is right here- there’s a lot of variability from year to year, but not any argument of bias that I’ve seen. For long term comparisons like this, they’re perfectly valid except for the fact that they don’t properly account for extreme values like, honestly, Jones (another point Six Ten makes). If anything, the numbers are biased against Jones.
Edmonds made bad breaks, resulting in a lot of diving catches that were routine flies.
You’re conflating reliability with validity. Just because a statistical analysis can produce consistent data doesn’t mean that it produces valid data. Here is a refresher:(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_(statistics)#Difference_from_validity). The problem with defensive metrics is that there is no evidence that they are either reliable or valid measures of defensive ability. Additionally, specifically for Edmonds the variance of his defensive numbers from year to year are huge. The maximum variance from his best to worst season was over 25 runs and a much as 18 runs between consecutive years which is utter garbage.
It’s only invalid if it isn’t measuring the construct, which DRS and UZR do do pretty well over time, because they are pretty highly correlated. Whether that construct is “good defense” is arguable, but given the convergence across defensive metrics from different foundations, kind of a hard one to make. Unless you’re a positivist, and how’s that time machine from pre cook and campbell treating you?
The null here is that the close correspondence between different defensive metrics means they are converging on the same construct. Given the correlation structure, they could vary from year to year simply because Edmonds was inconsistent and had bad years. You’d need another metric that took as inputs things people agreed were important to defense but are uncorrelated to DRS and UZR (who to be fair are correlated because of similar inputs) attack the validity of defensive metrics. When people say that defensive metrics aren’t measuring good defense, for it to be an acceptable argument you need to establish that the metrics don’t reliably go the same way in the same places (saying one player is good at one time and another is not). Simply handwaving and saying they’re unreliable (formally a violation of the Levene test) or invalid (they don’t measure a construct) isn’t enough.
If you’re going to make a “validity” argument, you need to show that the operations aren’t converging, and if they are, that the construct they’re measuring isn’t defense. I’m not seeing that here except for arguing from the results- because the data aren’t what I like, the method can’t be valid.
If you watched Edmonds so much you should be familiar with his bad jumps being barely saved by last second heroics.
Edmonds only had bad jumps in comparison to the truly elite, and he made up for that with his perfect routes to the ball.
“about the same as Edmonds offensive edge over him. Which is why they have similar WAR.”
IMO the point was that Jones’ edge on defense roughly matches Edmonds edge on offense, yet 71% of people polled said Jones was better.
If the poll results were ~55% for Jones, I don’t think there would have been a couple of thousand words written about it above… but given that they were close overall and that people generally seem to overweight offensive over defensive value, I think the expectation was that Edmonds would have gotten somewhere between maybe 45-55% of the vote, not 29%
Jones was Trout on defense. So good he was boring.
There’s no way that Edmonds was that far behind defensively!
Besides, offense is inherently more valuable than defense outside of the battery. The people who decide WAR values somehow haven’t figured out that Offensive WAR should be weighed significantly higher than Defensive WAR when you’re not dealing with pitchers or catchers.
That headline was like inhaling horseradish with my morning coffee…
I’m a huge Jones partisan, but it’s definitely closer than it looks at first. I think the biggest thing about Andruw Jones more generally is that there hadn’t been a center fielder like him since Willie Mays (source: my dad, who saw them both play when they were young). If Jones had had a normal decline, instead of falling off a cliff and sort of quitting on baseball, this wouldn’t even really be a discussion past this website.
The easy answer is Jim Edmonds. People are stupid.
all we need to do is get a brain, morans
While Jones was clearly the better defensive CF, Jim Edmonds was no slouch. I think it would be good to compare both of them to current HoF CFs, both offensively and defensively (and combined) to see how they stack up. Or, did Jay already do that?
If Andruw Jones fielded for his entire career like he did the first decade, it would be Jones. But Jim Edmonds was the better all-in player for the full career… and was no defensive slouch either, at least on the highlight reels, turning in a couple of my favorite catches.
The real shame is that they’re both going to have to wait for the veteran’s committee to put them into the Hall when they both should have gotten in via the writers’ ballot.
There was an era in which center field greatness went Griffey, Lofton, everyone else; and then there was one in which it went Beltran, Jones, Edmonds, everyone else. And somehow of that group, only Griffey is likely to get anywhere near the Hall from the writers’ vote.
Guys from the previous couple decades in the Hall who played center field are Yount, Dawson, and Puckett. But every one of the more recent guys was better than Puckett and probably Dawson. Moreover, Yount and Dawson are listed at other positions in the Hall (entirely correctly in Yount’s case, whose three best years were at shortstop before he switched).
So we are talking about arguably the five best center fielders between Mays and Trout. Or if you prefer, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th best center fielders between integration and Trout.
And, if the Astros scandal has the effect I think it will, only one of them will get 75% from the BBWAA. That’s dumb.
I was hoping Jones would spark a referendum on glove first hall of famers (I think Edmonds should be in, actually) but it looks like that’s not going to happen. Which means the next guy up is probably Andrelton Simmons, and his bat case is currently worse ( and the distance from him to the rest of the SS field is less, in part because short stops are so much better now, for a lot of reasons). Not to mention he’s not gonna be eligible for a while
I think catcher is a somewhat distinct argument, but they have the same problem (and a massive underrepresentation in the hall)
I don’t see defense-first guys making the Hall anytime soon, or at least not many of them. We don’t have a statistic that everyone from the analyst to the sportswriter to the Fangraphs reader to the general fan agrees with or understands. I think of Omar Vizquel and the disagreement over whether he was an elite defender or only pretty good. There’s little disagreement about Andruw Jones; every serious baseball observer knows he was a great defensive player. But who has any real confidence in saying that he was X % better than Edmonds or Chet Lemon or whoever?
Well, Ozzie Smith got in on his first ballot, so it’s not like there’s little hope for similar-type players (although Vizquel was clearly inferior to the Wizard in everything but offensive power).
The big takeaway: Kiley is still getting paid!
Kiley works for ESPN, not the Braves.
I think part of the reason for the perception of a greater difference than the advanced metrics show is Jones’ durability record. 10 straight seasons with 631-731 PA’s, whereas with Edmonds it was a much spottier up and down health record. You’d be missing chunks of seasons with him. So there was the perception that Jones’ performance was more consistent, predictably distributed throughout a season, or a peak of seasons. Whether that enhances his actual value relative to Edmonds is a different question. I suppose a lot depends on how thin your bench was. With Jones you didn’t really need an extra caddy on your roster, with Edmonds you frequently did.
Andruw Jones missed FIVE games TOTAL in the FOUR YEARS from 1998-2001. I always thought that had a part to play in shortening his later career. Nobody plays that much today.
That’s only during Jones’s prime. Overall, Edmonds had a much more consistent career.
Hmm, I definitely see this in Larry Walker’s difficulty in getting to the Hall…
Edmonds was a great player and I think he should be in, but if there were a hall of fame for running, catching the ball, and then flopping and rolling around on the ground for no reason, he’d be a first-ballot unanimous selection.
Jones also hit 2 HR in his first 2 World Series at bats at Yankee stadium at age 19.
Also, while Jones could be dinged for eating his way into uselessness in his 30s, it’s possible that Edmonds is dinged for showing up to St. Louis at 30 and all of the sudden going from a good power bat to a great one. Personally I find that totally unfair, but who knows. By WAR they are close and tie seems to usually go to the offensively gifted player, so it’s gotta be something holding him down.
Jones is a popular vote because of fan favoritism playing on a popular Braves team during their best era whereas Edmonds played a split career impacted by injuries. Both have an argument to the HoF — deservedly so. Fans are heavily biased toward their own preferred players and St. Louis is the smaller market.
Lol the Braves don’t have a larger or more vocal fanbase than the #bestfansinbaseball.
The teams have roughly the same amount of Twitter followers. STL routinely outdraws ATL by over 10k per game average despite ATL having a new stadium and better team in recent years. Cardinals also draw better TV ratings. Cardinals fans are generally regarded as obnoxious and overbearing while ATL is known for having apathetic fans who don’t even sell out playoff games. It’s not a fanbase thing.
I would guess the main reason for the poll results is Edmonds bat was great in ways that are underrated. Andruw was by far the better fielder and had 40 more career home runs. 10 gold gloves and 400+ home runs is sexy.
Edmonds had a career OPS over .900 but that’s not sexy. He didn’t hit 400 home runs. Didn’t bat over .300. Wasn’t a generational fielder (I would say there is even some sentiment that he was overrated and made plays look more difficult than they were).
Edmonds did everything good-great. Andruw was the best fielder of a generation and perceived as a “clean” player in the steroid era and hit 400 home runs.
For most baseball fans, it’s easier to recognize someone who really excels at 1 or 2 things (defense and power in this case) than someone who is really good at everything.
The Braves were huge on national television due to TBS. Same situation with the Cubs and WGN. Jones had a ton of exposure in the 90s and is likely a far more well known name among the elder millenial-young Gen X crowd.
The Cardinals also had a very successful era during Edmonds’ tenure on the team, including winning 2 Pennants and a World Series.
Unless you’re trying to make unsubstantiated PED claims (which is an issue of its own), it doesn’t matter that Edmonds was something of a late bloomer.
When I think of Jim Edmonds I think of lots of bad jumps that lead to lots of highlight catches.
Same here. In 2020 he would of stayed in a corner.
Not to sound nostalgic but grew up watching a ton of 90s Yankees and never saw Edmonds as anything less than a beast. The Angels always played the Yankees tough, he was usually the offense while playing a badass CF. Him landing on the Pujols Cardinals was like the millionth exasperating moment for just the early 2000s Cubs, especially while those lugs were signing everyone but Beltran to play CF
I never liked Jones much, granted some of that might just be the Braves being evil and even a young me sensing it…possibly through some kind of shinnin’
I think part of the reason for the perception of JOnes being superior is because he was so much better at a younger age. THere was the narrative that he was on a HOF track. Edmonds seemed more like a decent guy who had a few good years at the end even though it was a lot more than that.
Fun observations:
– Neither got to 2,000 hits so that’s not working in their favor
– Put together Jones’ 20’s (61.0 fWAR) and Edmonds’ 30’s (45.0 fWAR) and you’d have an inner circle HOFer with 2,737 H, 614 HR, 1,814 RBI, 1,749 R, 15 gold gloves and 8 All-Star games
The gap in defense between Andruw & Edmonds is a gulf so large it’s embarrassing to even compare them.
Andruw Jones is a Hall of Famer on his defense alone. Add in some better than decent offensive numbers and it shouldn’t even be a question. Comparing him to Edmonds, just no. Defensively Edmonds made a name with the spectacular catches, Andruw turned the spectacular into the routine.
He would’ve been…had he aged well. Falling off a cliff like Jones did really hurt his overall value and his Hall chances, along with allowing Edmonds to catch up if not surpass him.
Some similarities between Edmonds and Utley… string of elite years in a row, injury problems, doing everything pretty well, short career producing light counting stats. Similar WAR. Perception of being gritty. Not much MVP consideration when playing. Played a position that has been underrepresented in the HOF.
Uphill battle to enshrinement in the HOF, but probably deserving.
I think people are fooled a little by the scale of defensive metrics, which is probably their greatest flaw. To accept that Andruw Jones’s talent on defense as superlative is fine. But to have him as over 20 wins greater defensively than Edmonds, an established terrific defender, is just not something that I think should pass the smell test. I don’t think the spread of defensive talent, within a cohort of already elite fielders, is that high. This isn’t offense, where we can clearly see linear weights values of offensive production both context neutral and context dependent, though perhaps with Statcast data and OAA we will be able to in the future; the numbers with these two are actually very convenient for comparison, given concurrent and same-length careers: .385 wOBA is easy to see as dramatically better than .352 wOBA, and is easy to comprehend as 20 wins greater offensively.
I disagree. Jones got to everything, easily. Edmonds was like the ball Jeter dove in the stands for, no real reason to dive and Jones would of been standing under the routine pop fly.
Edmonds was the better player. As you noted, he was a significantly better hitter and aged better, and his own elite defense was at least close to Jones’s. The only reason Jones beats Edmonds out in WAR is because WAR in general overrates non-catcher defense (not to mention how hard it is to accurately value defense, anyway). Outside of the battery, it’s better to trade some defense for some offense when judging player value, and I have a hard time believing that Jones was that much better defensively in both players’ primes, anyway.
I mean, by the numbers, they aren’t even in the same ball park defensively. Overrating defense won’t matter unless there’s some bias within a position where some types of players are evaluated better than others based on things they do that don’t actually contribute to being a better player (which, Andruw Jones is again by metrics, by writer statements, and the vote above the best defensive center fielder ever, evidence of convergent validity between the defensive metrics and the actual construct of “being a better player”).
Unless you think there’s some systematic bias in evaluation within a position, which is much less likely than between positions, the defensive comparison is appropriate. Certainly more appropriate than between positions. It also converges with how people in general feel about Jones- if anything, his position at the weird tail of the defensive distribution UNDERRATES his impact, as tail events are consistently underweighted in impact when normalized. As a result, if we were using something like a koshi distribution to evaluate Jones or other tail players, the difference between Edmonds and Jones would be even larger. In short- rarity is special, and Jones was simply so rare that it imparts excess value over a consistent but only good player like Edmonds.
I feel compelled point out that while his defense isn’t Andruw Jones’s level Jim Edmonds was no slouch
Well to start with we’re talking about the 2 greatest defensive center fielders in baseball history. I’m not sure there is much doubt about that by any logical and true baseball fan. The way I see it is there are a few categories to focus on. First off Andruw Jones clearly had much more natural talent. Don’t get me wrong obviously Edmonds had a boatload as well but with him it also felt like he was the type of fielder that just tried harder than the others. I think they both were capable of making insane catches that no one else ever or since could. Their highlight reel catches putting them about even. Where Andruw to me separates himself is the regularity of such catches but more importantly he did so while covering a lot more ground. In his prime the corner outfielders pretty much knew anything hit directly at them or between them and the foul lines were theirs, every other fly ball was Andruw’s. He was a good bit faster than Edmonds as well.
Both won a lot of Gold Gloves and both played the majority of their careers in the NL but im pretty sure most voters would have agreed if Gold Gloves for outfielders were position specific Edmonds would have had a lot fewer awards as I don’t see him beating out Andruw for the Gold Glove at CF very often. I will give him this Edmonds to me still has the greatest catch in baseball history.