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Braves Check: June 30, 2009

The daily charts are probably going to be slow, if I get to them at all, until next week.  I’ve just been too busy to commit the time to the blog, with family in town last weekend and more coming this weekend.  You’ll also have to pardon my tardiness this week, but at least I’m posting it before the Braves have played a game this week, I guess.  This will be a shorter-than-usual Check.

Fourth place, five games out…that’s where the Braves stand on the last day of June.  Several players have been ailing, some for better reasons (McLouth) than others (Bennett), but the next few weeks before the All-Star Break could be dangerous for a team that hasn’t been remarkably good at any point in 2009.

Last Week’s Stats

The Braves survived the Yankees and Red Sox, but that’s about all you can say.  They lost both series and fell to 35-40 for the season.

Starting with the positives, Tommy Hanson just looks better and better with each start.  The young starter allowed just two hits while battling the flu (and MLB’s best lineup) in his most recent start on Sunday.  He now has a 4-0 record and a 2.48 ERA for the season, and I wouldn’t cite his won-loss record, except that I’m curious to see how long he can go without losing a game.

Javier Vazquez put together two great starts of his own, and Jurrjens wasn’t bad in his one start.  Kawakami looked great until he got hurt, so that leaves Derek Lowe’s mysteriously awful play as the only outlier in the rotation.

Garret Anderson started to show a little power this week, which was encouraging, especially considering the opposition.  He had four doubles and a homer among his nine hits.  Jeff Francoeur looked average for once, and Brian McCann was his usual self, but that was about it for average-or-better-performances out of the regular lineup.

Chipper Jones continued slumping, though fortunately for him, a .736 OPS week is considered a slump.  Every other regular fell below .700, with Kelly Johnson sporting a sick .214 (0-for-11 with 3 walks).

Soriano and Moylan were almost perfect out of the pen, while Gonzalez and O’Flaherty have to settle for “pretty good.”  Acosta, Bennett, Medlen, and Logan were not good at all.

The Road Ahead

This week’s schedule involves three with Philly at home, and three in Washington.  The Braves could make a nice dent in their division deficit with a series win or sweep of the Phillies, and it would really help if they would beat up on the Nats for once.

Probable starters:

Tue vsPHI: Kawakami vs. Joe Blanton
Wed vsPHI: Lowe vs. Cole Hamels
Thu vsPHI: Jurrjens vs. Carlos Carrasco
Fri @WAS: Vazquez vs. John Lannan
Sat @WAS: Hanson vs. Scott Olsen
Sun @WAS: Kawakami vs. Jordan Zimmermann

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Can the Braves trade for another bat? Corey Hart Edition

This may or may not be a recurring series, depending on how long the Braves remain in contention without trading for offensive help.

The Nate McLouth trade was nice, but the Braves still need offensive help if they plan to reach the postseason this year.  The trade rumors have been somewhat quiet on that front, with most of the talk surrounding who’s scouting Jeff Francoeur (Red Sox? Royals?) and not who the Braves might get as his replacement.

Corey Hart’s name has come up a few times, most recently in today’s Ken Rosenthal column.  Hart is an interesting player, but he only has one good full season to his credit.  Unlike Nate McLouth, who was strong in ‘08, Hart’s best season was in ‘07, when he posted a .380 wOBA.  He has only been mediocre since, but he’s still a bargain who is under team control through 2011.

While we’re talking quality, “mediocre” looks pretty good compared to the “dreadful” we’ve seen from Jeff Francoeur since 2005, and Frenchy could use a change of scenery.  Unfortunately, the Brewers aren’t likely to want Frenchy, so these will have to be separate trades.

What the Braves have to offer is pitching, something the Brewers desperately need.  That would seem to make these teams a decent trade match, but can the Brewers take on a contract?  The Braves will need that in order to make a pitching deal, unless they’re willing to part with Jair Jurrjens or Tommy Hanson.  The former is more likely to go than the latter, but I can’t see the Braves moving either of their young starters.

That leaves Derek Lowe, Kenshin Kawakami, Javier Vazquez, and Tim Hudson as trade bait.  Jon Heyman thinks the Brewers could add payroll for a pitcher, which they would have to do in any of these cases.  Hudson is likely not tradeable as he recovers from Tommy John surgery, so let’s dispose of that one first.

Kawakami I think is the next least likely to be traded, since he is still a relative unknown as an MLB pitcher, but perhaps another team with a solid Japanese scouting presence would make an offer for him.  I’m not sure if the Brewers are a match there or not.

Lowe essentially signed with the Braves because no one else would give him a fourth guaranteed year, so the Brewers would have to be willing to take on a ton of money for him: approximately $53M over the next 3 1/2 years.

Javy Vazquez is another story.  He’s been the Braves’ best pitcher this year and is owed a total of $17.5M through next year.  This would be tough for the Braves to handle from a P.R. standpoint, and I would guess that Corey Hart might not be considered an adequate return for him.  The Braves have been willing to make unpopular moves lately, so I suppose it would be possible.

I don’t see any great matches, although I think we can safely assume that the Braves would like having Hart and that the Brewers would like having any of those starters.

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Braves Chart of the Day: June 24, 2009

Today we’re going to talk about one of Joe Morgan’s favorite topics: consistency.  The opposite of “consistent” would be “streaky,” and one Brave in particular has been noted over his career for his streakiness.  That’s Kelly Johnson, and he’s the inspiration for today’s chart.

The Braves never seem to know what they’re going to get out of Kelly.  One week, he’s Rogers Hornsby, and the next he’s Mario Mendoza; rarely is he anything in between, and that hasn’t seemed to improve over his career.  Kelly’s problem now is that the hot stretches are getting shorter, while the cold stretches keep getting longer.  He’s having a pretty bad year as a result, and he’s probably hearing Martin Prado’s name everywhere he goes.

The metric for this chart is wOBA, which is explained here.  The short version: it’s an improvement on OPS, scaled to on-base percentage.  So, .300 is below average, .340 is average, and .380 is quite good.  It probably needs a better name, too, because wOBA is a pretty meaningless acronym considering what the number actually means.  I guess we’ll work with what we have.

To get each player’s “streakiness” from week to week, I did two things.  First, I threw out weeks with fewer than 15 PAs.  That’s roughly four starts, which is on the borderline for what I would consider “regular.”  I also threw out players who hadn’t accumulated at least five such weeks, so that eliminated David Ross, Omar Infante, and a few others.  Then, I compared the standard deviation of wOBA to the player’s overall wOBA (otherwise I’d be punishing players with higher wOBAs).  That’s the percentage on the chart, with higher numbers representing greater streakiness.

I realize that there are some caveats with this kind of analysis.  Half a season probably isn’t a large enough sample to weed out normal variations in wOBA, and it would be better to look at career numbers.  Anyway, here you go.  Stats are through Sunday.

You’ll notice that Kelly is actually second to the rookie, Schafer, in overall streakiness, but both of them (and Francoeur) have been all over the place.  Escobar and Anderson, on the other hand, have been more consistent with their production.  That’s a compliment to Escobar, not so much to Anderson.

I’d say that despite the small sample, this kind of confirms the perception of Johnson that we’ve had for some time.  However, it’s likely that no one would care if his wOBA were .393 instead of .293.

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Braves Chart of the Day: June 23, 2009

To say that the Braves didn’t have much team speed before trading for Nate McLouth would be an understatement.  The various broadcast teams covering the Braves have made a big deal about his speed since then, focusing especially on his stolen base success.

I have to commend them for this, particularly the FOX team of Sciambi and Simpson, who continually noted that Nate had been caught precisely once in his career on a catcher’s throw.  Success rate is a huge factor in the value of stolen bases because you really don’t add any run value to the team unless you’re successful at least 70% of the time.  If you’re not, you have no business running.

I’m bringing this up today because McLouth was caught by a catcher for the second time in his career last night.  He was caught at third when Bobby Cox sent both Nate and Kelly Johnson with two strikes on Chipper Jones at the plate.  McLouth had already stolen second during Johnson’s at bat and was thrown out easily at third by Geovany Soto.

Baseball Prospectus has the best method I’m aware of for evaluating baserunning contributions, called Equivalent Base Running Runs, or EqBRR (they love their acronyms).  They define it as: “the number of runs contributed by a player’s advancement on the bases, above what would be expected based on the number and quality of the baserunning opportunities with which the player is presented.”  I thought we’d look at Nate McLouth’s career today.  He came up with the Pirates first in 2005 but didn’t play a full season until last year.  Currently his career success rate is 91.7%, 67-for-73.

However, steals aren’t the only component of baserunning, and BP accounts for the rest of it, too.  EqBRR is made up of five components, including “ground advancement,” stolen bases, “air advancement,” “hit advancement,” and “other advancement.”

Just to provide a little perspective, since 2005, 228 players have recorded a total EqBRR of 1 or higher, which isn’t a lot of runs.  Only 29 players have an EqBRR of 10 runs or more, amounting to roughly one win above their expected run contribution.  A total of 378 players have an EqBRR of -1 or lower, including 30 at -10 or lower.

Some surprising names on the list: Chone Figgins at the top of the list isn’t a big surprise, but perhaps Marcus Giles at #16 is (ahead of Rafael Furcal).  Giles is apparently very good at out and air advancement compared to others with similar speed.  The names at the bottom are less surprising, with McCann and Kotchman among the worst, and Bengie Molina at the very bottom with -23 runs.  Bill Hall has been the worst stolen base decision-maker, with -9.4 SB runs and +1.5 in the other categories.  He is 36-for-62 (58%) in stolen base success since 2005.

McLouth ranks 10th on the list, with 20.3 runs above expected and a fairly normal spread across the various categories.  He runs well and makes good decisions, and that would seem to be confirmed by the numbers.

The chart below compares McLouth’s run contribution to the rest of the top 25 by category.  Nate is on the outside in green, and the others are on the inside in blue.

Nate’s prolific stolen base success makes up for his odd inability to advance more often than not on ground balls.  His “other” success (wild pitches, passed balls, etc.) is also a bit of an outlier among the top 25.

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Braves Check: June 22, 2009

For a World Series champ that didn’t gut its roster after winning, the Phillies have been very, very bad lately.  The Braves have been nearly as bad, though, finishing their road trip at 3-6 and losing all three series 2-1.  They played well enough to have taken two of three in Boston, which would have been impressive, but former Brave Nick Green sent them home losers with a walk-off homer in yesterday’s series finale.

The Marlins have again overtaken the Braves for third place, leaving the Braves with three teams to pass in the East, but still only 4.5 games out.  Even though they’re not playing well enough to feel good about themselves right now, the Braves are certainly not out of the race.

Last Week’s Stats

Tommy Hanson had the first great start of his young career this week in Cincinnati, pitching six shutout innings to get his second career win.  The rest of the rotation was fairly solid, although in recent weeks they haven’t seemed quite as good as they did in April and May.

Javy Vazquez gave up a three-run homer to his mound opponent (and inexplicable Braves Killer) Micah Owings, a hit which proved to be the difference on Wednesday, but he was very good otherwise and actually threw a complete game (8 innings) despite allowing four runs.  Jair Jurrjens had his Tuesday start washed out and struggled on Sunday against the Red Sox.  He gave up six runs (3 ER) in 8 1/3 innings between the two starts.  Kenshin Kawakami outlasted his struggling fellow countryman Daisuke Matsuzaka in Friday’s win over the Sox, and Derek Lowe turned in a somewhat typical 6 1/3-inning, 3-run game on Saturday.

Mike Gonzalez gave up four unearned runs in four innings out of the bullpen in a week where not many Braves relievers actually got a lot of work (especially after Tuesday’s rain).  Jeff Bennett gave up 3 runs in 4 2/3 innings, including Nick Green’s homer on Sunday.  He walked five and gave up six hits, so he was actually lucky not to have allowed even more runs.

Peter Moylan, Rafael Soriano, and Eric O’Flaherty were virtually untouchable all week.  Moylan and O’Flaherty each allowed a hit (and no runs) in 2 2/3 and 2 innings, respectively.  Soriano pitched two perfect innings, striking out five.

The offense was partially carried by Nate McLouth this week, his first great week as a Brave.  He “only” hit .308, but Nate had 2 doubles and 2 homers to push his OPS near 1.000 for the week.  Garret Anderson arguably had a better week than McLouth at 8-for-19, although he had just one extra-base hit.  His season line of .280/.313/.385 is beginning to look more respectable as his poor BABIP luck corrects itself.  If Anderson would hit for a little more power, learn to draw a few more walks, or try on defense (none of which is likely at this stage in his career), he might be a decent player, or at least passable at LF for a supposedly contending team.

Jeff Francoeur was along for the ride again this week and amazingly drew two walks (and stole a base!), but three singles made up the rest of his contribution, and his OPS slipped closer to .600.  Matt Diaz contributed more value than Francoeur in fewer plate appearances, going 3-for-11 with a double and a homer.  Gregor Blanco started for Frenchy on Sunday and got his first hit of the year, a ground ball single that barely squirted through the middle.

Brian McCann and Chipper Jones were merely average at the plate this week, while Yunel Escobar was more predictably mediocre.  Escobar also had another mental error in Sunday’s game, allowing a pop-up to fall in the middle of his territory at SS, eventually leading to a run.  It’s not like the Braves have anyone good to replace him, but he’s been frustrating lately.

On the other hand, the Braves do have a potential replacement for Kelly Johnson, who had yet another awful week at the plate: 1-for-15 with 2 walks.  Martin Prado, who has a solid .789 OPS for the year, had a good week filling in around the diamond.  Rounding out the infield performances, Casey Kotchman had just 4 hits, all singles, in 21 at bats.

The Road Ahead

This week will be the toughest of the entire season, a full 7 games against three tough teams: the Cubs, Yankees, and Red Sox.  Six will be against the Yanks and Red Sox, but the Braves are fortunate enough to avoid both Sabathia and Burnett.  They also will avoid Lester this weekend, although they will face both Beckett and Wakefield again.

Here are the matchups:

Mon vsCHC: Vazquez vs. Ryan Dempster
Tue vsNYY: Hanson vs. Chien-Ming Wang
Wed vsNYY: Kawakami vs. Joba Chamberlain
Thu vsNYY: Lowe vs. Andy Pettitte
Fri vsBOS: Jurrjens vs. Josh Beckett
Sat vsBOS: Vazquez vs. Tim Wakefield
Sun vsBOS: Hanson vs. Brad Penny

If any of Boston’s games are rained out early this week, the Braves will see John Smoltz on Friday for his Sox debut.

Let’s hope the home team can hold their own this week and at least pass the Marlins in the standings.  The Phillies aren’t going to be this bad all year, and the Braves will eventually have to improve in order to stay in the race.

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