Baseball Prospectus | Articles | Team Health Reports: Atlanta Braves
Red lights for Smoltz, Ramirez, and Jordan are obvious. I don’t know why Giles gets a red; he’s gotten hurt, but always in catastrophic injuries that (theoretically) could happen to anyone and aren’t supposed to reoccur. Chipper isn’t going to the outfield, I don’t know why they keep saying that.
Yeah, Giles makes no sense. You can’t predict fluke injuries and none of his past injuries are likely to be recurring problems.
They keep saying that about Chipper because:
(a) BP has always overstated the value and/or impact of prospects, even great ones like Marte, and think that clubs should move borderline hall-of-famers for 20 year olds as early as possible; and
(b) they don’t follow the Braves that closely.
Added to Craig’s list is my observation that BP’s defensive metrics mislabel Jones’ fielding. According to the research of Mike Emeigh (at Baseball Think Factory and SABR) the Braves as a staff have had an unusually small number of ground balls in the zones manned by the 3B. Any system that attempts to modify the old standby Range Factor with LHP / RHP and GBO / FBO will mislabel some of the Braves players possibly overating Andruw and almost certainly underating Chipper compared to a pitch-by-pitch metric along the lines of Zone Rating.
As an aside, I don’t necessarily agree with Mac T’s concerns about BP’s fielding metrics and their relation to average rather than replacement. Most of the work I’ve read suggests that the difference between replacement and average on defense is microscopic compared to the difference between replacement and average pitching or hitting. My personal observation would tend to agree with that, especially for non up the middle positions.
bamadan: BPro VASTLY overrates catcher defense, setting the replacement level so low as to give hilarious results.
Check Mike Matheny’s BPro DT card here:
Link
Apparently, he was 31 runs above replacement, and 11 above average last year, implying that the average catcher is 20 runs better than replacement. Tangotiger said recently that the difference between the absolute best and absolute worst catchers in the league is perhaps 20 runs. This probably understates the value of Pudge in his prime, but it’s a lot more plausible than the results BPro gives here. Matheny peaks out with a 5.0 WARP3 season, 2000, in which he hit .261/.317/.361. If a marginal win is really worth $2 million as Doug Pappas has shown, then Matheny was worth $10 million that season, and around $8 million the past two. Sorry, but I don’t buy that.
Kyle, I don’t really disagree, but I really haven’t studied BP’s newest catcher defensive metric. I’ve stayed on top of the Woolner theory of a di minimus value to pitch calling and the various responses to that published around the ‘net. But I can’t quite get my mind around the concept that calling a good game, or being able to “frame” pitches is less important that PBs and WPs. I have a feeling that catcher defense will be the most difficult nut to crack of all filding position evaluations.
And I miss reading Pappas’ columns at BP and his blog. What a great loss.