Archive for Brandon Phillips

The Cy Young Award.

The Jackie Robinson Award.

The Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award.

Players dream of earning these awards during their career. To be a part of the prestige and history of the game in that manner is the stuff that dreams are made of.  Then, we have the award named after baseball contemporaries.

Matt Klaassen started the Carter-Batista Awards (CBA) in 2009 to recognize those players whose offensive value is exaggerated by their RBI totals.  Joe Carter’s name is listed first because not only does he own the highest CBA score since 1990, he owns three of the top seven.
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The top prospect label is a form of baseball tenure. No matter if the player is deemed a bust, what once vaulted him to the top of prospect lists will continue to earn him big league opportunities.

Players aren’t considered to be the best of the best by prospect mavens unless their skills project extremely well at the major league level. When a player of this ilk fails, analysts can usually point to a specific flaw preventing his success. If a former top prospect is struggling to stick in the big leagues, many organizations will take a flier on the player to try their hand at solving his problems. If successful, a team can reap the rewards of a cheap and effective player. Otherwise, the investment was minimal, and the team can cut ties without any real risk.

This is why players like Lastings Milledge, Brandon Wood, and Jeff Francoeur will continue to get signed. In covering all three of these players over the last month, I got to thinking about how frequently these prospects-turned-busts turned things around at the major league level. Does it happen?

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If you’ve taken an introductory math class, you’ve probably seen the bell curve graph that explains how the distribution of things are grouped around the average and thinner at the extremes. National League second baseman have decided to band together and disprove normal distribution in 2008, however.

As a group, they are hitting .267/.335/.415 for a .750 OPS. Normal distribution would suggest that we’d find a cluster of players with an OPS between .700 and .800, but in reality, only one of the 13 qualified second baseman falls in that range – Luis Castillo. The other twelve are split into two distinct groups – tremendous and terrible. This morning, we look at the guys excelling, and tonight, we’ll look at those who are dragging the average down.

We’ve talked about the amazing years Chase Utley and Dan Uggla are having. Both are having historically tremendous seasons for a second baseman, and they’re mortal locks to represent the NL at the all-star game. But behind those two MVP candidates are four pretty good players in their own right.

Orlando Hudson: .303/.372/.503, 0.82 WPA/LI
Brandon Phillips: .287/.336/.529, 0.55 WPA/LI
Kelly Johnson: .299/.362/.495, 0.34 WPA/LI
Mark DeRosa: .297/.384/.449, 0.66 WPA/LI

All of these guys are having seasons that would create a strong case for an all-star bid in any other year. Hudson and Phillips both add terrific defense to their offensive value, while Johnson and DeRosa continue to be the under the radar stars for their respective teams. You really can’t go wrong with any of these six guys, as all of them are having tremendously valuable seasons.