Just a note… Even though Andruw’s batting average is just .207, there are four regulars with worse OPS: Furcal, Jordan, Mondesi, and Estrada. Franco as well. Estrada’s actually been a more productive hitter because his OBP is higher — a big fat .299 — but the others have been worse.
Runs created/27 Outs:
Chipper 13.61
Marcus 7.71
Orr 5.14
LaRoche 3.88
Hampton 3.76
Estrada 3.47
Andruw 3.02
Furcal 3.01
Jordan 2.96
Perez 2.84
Langerhans 2.62
Mondesi 2.26
Franco 2.03
What I guess I’m saying is that other than Chipper, Orr, and Marcus, the whole lineup has pretty much sucked. (After his big day yesterday, Betemit actually has a higher RC/27 than Orr, but that’s in extremely limited playing time.) And that yes, the Braves would have been better off hitting Hampton fifth.
Great post. No shock to see both Jordan and Mondesi at the bottom of that list.
The biggest drag on the Braves lineup right now is those two consistently sucking up outs.
What a pleasant surprise Orr has been.
Thanks, Mac;
Im a twenty year fan of Bill James and understand rc/27 outs. It was the method I used to disallow “ringer” cards in my S-O-M and APBA Leagues. I haven’t studied the Win Shares thing. But I wonder if there’s a “runs prevented” stat for pitchers. Someone might argue that the stat might be influenced by team defense, but a K clearly prevents a run.
This tells us pretty much what we already knew, that most of the hitters have been sucking pretty consistently. I’m not particularly worried about most of them. Furcal/Andruw/Julio/LaRoche are going to improve, hardly a concern for me there. The others are a bit more questionable. But you got to keep in mind that neither Mondesi nor Jordan had an AB’s last year, so they obviously aren’t going to start the season sharp. I’ve seen reason to hope for decent production from both of them, but we’ll know for sure in a month.
I’ve also been impressed with Orr so far. Excellent utility player.
Thanks for the post Mac. It emphasizes my impression of the Brave’s offense so far. That is, that aside from couple of clutch hits from Jordan and Estrada, Chipper’s been the offense. Orr’s done a great job as a utility player, and I’d still like to see Langerhans get a few more AB’s.
If you look at the stats over the last 7 games, Furcal is coming to life, hench to me the better scoring the last few games. It is amazing how much he really means to this team.
I think must people just used a park-normalized Total Runs Allowed to figure out how many runs a pitcher has saved. Of course, you can calculate a defense-independent run average, but there isn’t really any reason to use such a metric to evaluate past performance; i.e. just because someone has been DIPS lucky thus far doesn’t mean he hasn’t helped his team win by limiting scoring *cough*MikeHampton*cough*.
Do you think Hampton can play RF? I’d think that he would still be able to pitch every fifth day.
Would it not be true though that if a pitcher year after year is lucky, some of that is not random ? I mean throughout his career, he has been “lucky”, and if you remove the coors experiment, has been very successfull, even dominant.
Here are some interesting Mike Hampton stats:
Year ERA DIPS DIP% BIPA K/9 G/F
2005 1.67 4.46 2.66 0.22 3.35 1.41
2004 4.28 4.44 1.04 0.30 4.54 2.01
2003 3.84 4.24 1.10 0.27 5.21 1.95
2002 6.15 5.61 0.91 0.31 3.73 1.67
2001 5.41 5.15 0.95 0.30 5.41 1.75
2000 3.14 3.90 1.24 0.27 6.24 2.51
1999 2.90 3.76 1.30 0.26 6.67 2.56
1998 3.36 4.23 1.26 0.30 5.83 2.70
1997 3.83 3.97 1.04 0.28 5.61 2.26
1996 3.59 3.90 1.08 0.30 5.67 2.44
1995 3.35 3.79 1.13 0.28 6.87 2.00
Hampton has been extremely lucky this year. I don’t think that there’s any way that his BIPA continues to be this good. His best years were due to an unsually high strikeout rate and being an extreme groundball pitcher.
Even though Mondesi and JOrdan aren’t exactly setting the world on fire, at this point in the season, they both have more RBIs than JD Drew and Jordan has less strikouts than him.
That’s not all bad considering how much they are paying Drew vs. Jordan/Mondesi combined. Drew was only batting.236 before a 3-4 night on Wed. got him up to .263
I think Jordan is coming around well now. Mondesi still looks rather lost. Wouldn’t mind seeing Langerhans taking some AB’s from Mondesi here soon.