This is my second consecutive article about the Braves, which breaks my previous record of consecutive articles about the Braves by exactly two.
I’ve meant to write other articles in between these, but life has a habit of getting in the way of things. I wanted to get something written about the Red Sox, and their lefty-heavy rotation. I wanted to check in with Billy Hamilton. And Russell Martin deserves a little bit of a write up. I’ve never written a word about Russell Martin, which I should maybe do something about. Russell Martin is a really interesting player.
But we’re back on the Braves. What can you do? I have to write where the spirit leads me.
* * *
Matt Kemp is slated to be the Braves leftfielder in 2017. He is coming off a season during which he hit .268 with 35 homers and 108 runs batted in. He scored 89 runs. He hit 39 doubles. He did that while splitting time between two teams: San Diego and Atlanta. San Diego is pretty rough on power hitters. You all know that.
I don’t want to imply that everything was positive about Matt Kemp last year. He drew just 36 walks, and had an on-base percentage of .305. That’s not good. The NL’s cumulative on-base percentage was .322 last year, and that is including the pitchers. Matt Kemp wasn’t great at getting on base.
And he was a pretty bad defense player. He only made three errors, but his range was abysmal, and the advanced defensive metrics all give him negative marks. He’s getting old. It happens to all of us.
As a baseball player, Matt Kemp has one strength, and a bunch of weaknesses. His strength is that he hits for power. Last year he finished 31st in the majors in Isolated Power. His .231 mark was a few ticks below Mike Trout (.235) and Robinson Cano (.231). He was ahead of guys like Votto and J.D. Martinez and Hanley Ramirez. That’s his one positive: he cranks out the extra-base hits.
And then there are the negatives. He doesn’t get on base. He’s no longer a good defensive outfielder. He attempted one stolen base last year, which is a far cry from the 51 attempts he made in 2011.
So that’s who Matt Kemp is. We can all agree on those general parameters. He can hit a baseball much farther than I’ve ever hit a baseball, but purely as major league player, Matt Kemp rates as a negative at every other facet of the game. I don’t think any of us disagree about this.
* * *
Which brings us to a recent
article posted at FanGraphs, listing the rankings of the left-fielders of all major league teams by position. This is one part of an absolutely essential and brilliant series projecting team rankings at all positions, including the rotations and bullpens of each team. I look forward to this every year, and I encourage all of you to check the whole thing out at FanGraphs. I think they’re wrapping up the bullpens today.
What I want to talk about is where the Braves, and Matt Kemp, rank among major league left fielders.
There are thirty teams in major league baseball. Of those thirty teams, FanGraphs ranks the Atlanta Braves 29th by anticipated production from their leftfielders. Impressively (or un-impressively), the Braves clock in with one of the few negative totals at a position in all of baseball. Here’s their table:
Name
|
PA
|
AVG
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
Bat
|
BsR
|
Fld
|
WAR
|
Matt Kemp
|
630
|
.266
|
.315
|
.455
|
1.2
|
-0.8
|
-13.1
|
0.1
|
Emilio Bonifacio
|
35
|
.247
|
.296
|
.315
|
-1.5
|
0.1
|
-0.3
|
-0.1
|
Jace Peterson
|
28
|
.243
|
.325
|
.348
|
-0.6
|
0
|
-0.1
|
0
|
Mel Rojas Jr.
|
7
|
.227
|
.287
|
.354
|
-0.3
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
Total
|
700
|
.263
|
.314
|
.443
|
-1.2
|
-0.7
|
-13.5
|
-0.1
|
FanGraphs projects Matt Kemp getting the bulk of playing time in leftfield, and they project that he will be about the same player that he was in 2016: a decent power hitter, a less-than-ideal baserunner, and a poor defensive outfielder.
When I saw the Braves listed 29th in baseball in leftfield, my brain processed the information is two distinct ways. I thought:
That’s probably right. Matt Kemp isn’t a very good ballplayer anymore. He can’t get on base, and he’s terrible in the field and on the base paths. All he does is hit dingers.
And I thought:
Home runs matter. And just who the hell was going to drive in runs for the Braves if not Matt Kemp?
Let’s unpack these responses for a second.
The first response is the one that I’ve been conditioned to think from my years of immersion in sabermetric-leaning baseball writing. Home runs matter, but so does defense. So does a player’s baserunning. So does getting on base. That’s important. That’s the most important thing.
I think this thinking is right. On-base percentage matters. Catching liners in the outfield matters. Matt Kemp might’ve walloped a few dingers last year, but he used up a lot of outs, too, and gave back runs on defense.
So there is a part of my brain that thinks it is absolutely reasonable to think that Matt Kemp, playing full-time, is a ‘zero’ player. There is a part of me that doesn’t question valuing a 35-HR, 108 RBI season as being worth 0.7 Wins Above Replacement, because I understand that 35 homers and 108 runs batted in doesn’t cover a wide percentage of events that Matt Kemp was involved in during the 2017 season.
But another part of me thinks a team just needs home runs, damn it.
A baseball season is a long thing. There are times when you can win with singles and doubles, and there are times when you can win by a well-executed sacrifice bunt, or by a monster bullpen. But there are times when you need instant runs, and when those times happen, it helps to have a couple guys who can hit the ball out of the park, even if they don’t do anything else.
This is where WAR comes off the rails for me, frankly. This is where I think the metricwhiffsin its effort to encompass the totality of a player. Saying that Matt Kemp has less value to the Braves than, say, a platoon of Edwin Rosario and Robbie Grossman have for the Twins strikes me as not only wrong, but silly.
It’s silly in part because it is understanding Matt Kemp in a vacuum: what does he do, and how does it compare to what other individual players do? There is no understanding of whether or not his specific skills or flaws matter to his team. Matt Kemp is a 0.7-win player on the Braves, and he’d be a 0.7-win player if he played on the New York Mets.
I don’t buy this. The Braves have one decent power hitter on their roster (Freeman), and a string of singles and doubles hitters. Getting Matt Kemp helped them because he gave them a second guy capable of hitting a homerun every now and then, even if that second guy was a crummy defender. That was an important add to the Braves offense.
And it wouldn’t have mattered at all to a team like the Mets. What would the Mets have done with another low-OBP slugging OF? They had already cornered the market on those guys. They could put one on every position on the diamond, and have a spare to talk to David Wright.
Matt Kemp played 56 games for the Braves last year, posting a .280/.336/.519 batting line. He was third on the team in homers and fifth in RBI’s, despite playing a third of a season. He was the Atlanta version of Gary Sanchez.
For that, Baseball-Reference tallied his WAR at 0.0. If you expand the decimal down, it’s actually somewhere in the negatives. Baseball-Reference calculated Kemp as having had negative value for the Braves in 2016.
Let’s unpack that further. Chase d’Arnaud, in about the same number of plate appearances for the Braves, posted a .245/.317/.335 batting line. He hit one homer. He is credited with a WAR of 0.3. Jeff Francouer was at .249/.290/.341, same plate appearances as Kemp. He’s credited with 0.7 WAR. Unless Baseball-Reference gives extra credit for players with French names, this doesn’t pass the smell test.
Name
|
PA
|
AVG
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
WAR
|
Matt Kemp
|
241
|
.280
|
.336
|
.519
|
-0.0
|
Jeff Francouer
|
276
|
.249
|
.290
|
.381
|
0.7
|
This is ridiculous, right? We can all see that this is ridiculous. Jeff Francouer could be the reincarnation of peak Willie Mays defensively, but there is no way that difference makes up for a forty-six point gap in on-base percentage, and a 138-point gap in slugging percentage, not unless Matt Kemp laid down and took a nap every time he played left. Jeff Francouer absolutely did not help the Braves win more games than Matt Kemp last year, and any metric that argues that his value significantly outpaced Kemp’s contribution to the Braves is missing something big.
And we know that Matt Kemp improved the Braves: the record strongly suggests that this is the case. Atlanta went 37-68 before they acquired Matt Kemp at the deadline…and they went 31-25 after he came over. What changed?
It wasn’t pitching and defense. The Braves allowed more runs per game after Kemp arrived, which suggests that Kemp’s defense might’ve hurt the team:
2016 Braves
|
W-L
|
Pitcher's ERA
|
Before Kemp
|
37-68
|
4.39
|
After Kemp
|
31-25
|
4.76
|
But if the Braves lost a bit on the defensive side of the coin, they more than made up for that loss on offense:
Before/After
|
W-L
|
Batter's Runs Per Game
|
Before Kemp
|
37-68
|
3.4
|
After Kemp
|
31-25
|
5.2
|
The team’s improved offense isn’t all about Kemp, of course. Freddie Freeman had a monster second-half, and Swanson started to get his legs under him as a major league player. Matt Kemp, alone, didn’t turn the Braves from an 100-loss team to a borderline contender.
But he quite obviously did help. He contributed in one area where the Braves really needed help (slugging), and the team started to win games. His presence had to have mattered. The change in the Braves offensive performance can’t be credited entirely to coincidence. Matt Kemp changed the Braves for the better. Our best metrics don’t credit him for any of that improvement.
* * *
I didn’t follow the Braves last year. I suspect that most of you didn’t follow them too closely, either. And I had sort of forgotten about Matt Kemp entirely….I doubt that I ever thought about him last season. I don’t think I watched a single at-bat.
If I judged his 2016 season entirely through the lens of the WAR's tallied on FanGraphs or Baseball-Reference, I’d assume that Kemp had a mediocre year. I’d think, too, that the Braves made a mistake spending money on a player like Kemp, who has no ‘value’ to a baseball team, only cost.
But it turns out that’s not right. The Braves team experienced a dramatic turn-around at the start of August, and Matt Kemp seems like he was a key part of that turn-around. Although the range of his contributions as a baseball player is limited to power hitting, his presence on the Braves improved the team’s offense, and any metric that suggests Matt Kemp was a net-zero for Atlanta last year seems to be missing the wider picture.
I’m not trying to knock WAR. I reference the metric in just about every article I write for this site. What I’m trying to address is the divide that occurs in my head when I think about the metric. What I’m trying to understand is that way that it sometimes blinds me to other possibilities.
I think that the blindness is an individualized one. I think that the flaw in WAR…the big limit of the metric…is that it tries to reduce a lot of variables into separate ones. It sees individual players, but it does not adjust to the wider contexts of a team’s structure. There is no adjustment made for the fact that baseball teams need some guys to hit homeruns, just as some teams need left-handed bullpen arms or a good defensive shortstop.
In a way, this distinction echoes the old debate about ‘best’ and ‘most valuable.’ Matt Kemp is not a great baseball player, or even a particularly good one. But Matt Kemp had value for the Braves in 2016. He was an important part of the team last year, and if he’s health he’ll be important again in 2017.
I think that matters. I think that’s a distinction that has some importance in our struggle to understand the game, and I think it’s important to the story we tell about what happened in a year. Matt Kemp, from what I can tell, was an integral part of the Braves turnaround last year, and I didn't read a single article in any saber-leaning site that covered it, or even considered the possibility. Matt Kemp was a zero. Matt Kemp was washed up. Matt Kemp doesn’t matter.
He did matter. There’s a good chance that Matt Kemp helped turn around a last-place team. That’s an interesting story, in that it might tell us things we don’t know about batting order, or lineup structure, or what makes an offense efficient or inefficient. It's interesting because it give us new avenues to understand the game. And it’s a fun story, because it’s always fun when a bad team starts to play good baseball.
We’re missing these story. We shouldn’t.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com