FanPost

Sea Bass leads Team SSS...a look at the Braves 10% into 2011


So the Atlanta Braves have now wrapped up 10% (10.49%, to be exact) of the season. It's been a bumpy start, to be sure, and you can bet on a lot changing between now and October.

The following statistics have been collected over these 17 games, but should be taken with a grain of salt. 17 games doesn't begin to approach a large enough sample size to make any conclusions.

First the hitters...

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As you can see, Sea Bass shockingly heads the list of our most valuable players through the first 17 contests. While his wOBA is fairly pedestrian, Alex has slugged enough to earn himself a positive value in the hitting department. A minute UZR sample size shows he's been well above-average at shortstop early this season, as he ranks 14th among all MLB fielders and 2nd at short so far this season.

Brian McCann's second-place finish is a bit surprising as he receives no defensive performance bonus to his WAR calculation. His offense and positional bonus are enough to pull him ahead of Jason Heyward, who is not surprisingly the team's best hitter thus far. His above-average defense has not been enough to make up for his positional adjustment, however, which cause him to drop below Sea Bass and McCann on the list of most valuable players through an incredibly small amount of games.

Chipper's found his stroke at the plate, but the UZR gods appear to be angry with him. He is one of four players currently owning a negative UZR in a negligible sample size. David Ross uses two caught basestealers to pad his otherwise sparse amount of data this season, but he's scored points in all four WAR-bearing categories. Prado somehow uses his reliability in the field and great (but still meaningless at this point) defensive metrics to eke out a slight positive value despite his poor plate performance.

From there, it's downhill. Uggla and McLouth have been particularly poor so far this season, but again, we're looking at a tiny piece of the 2011 pie.

Now, our pitchers:

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Not surprisingly, Derek Lowe takes our top spot on this list. His renaissance over the past couple months of baseball has been incredibly valuable to the Braves.

The entirety of our pitching staff has a positive or negligible value, so I won't spend a lot of time on this. Kimbrel has been rock solid, Hanson looks starkly better on this paper than he's looked on my big screen, and Mike Minor has technically been worse than George Sherrill.

17 games, 7-10, 10.49% of the way in...and none of this means much of anything. But it's still a little bit interesting enough for a quick gander.

-C

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