Atlanta Braves Morning Chop: Contest Results

Hitter Questions

H1:  How many games does Freddie Freeman play in 2016?

This result surprises me a bit.  Most of you thought he’d make it to 135 or more games (it was 158).  This over/under number was selected with the purpose of trying to make you think about whether his injured wrist from 2015 would hold up… and obviously it did.  75.7% believed it would.

H2:  How many Braves’ batters will hit at least 10 homers in 2016?

The breaking point on this question was 4:  4 or more or 3 and fewer.  It was exactly 4 (Freeman, Garcia, Markakis, Kemp) and 66.9% agreed with that… though probably no one had an inkling that 12 homers would have come from Matt Kemp in a Braves’ uniform.

H3:  Which offensive category will the Braves do best in, relative to ranking vs. the rest of the league?

The team was best in terms of strikeouts… 9th overall, which is a good position.  They struck out 1240 times for the year.  The Angels were best at 991 (116 fewer than the 2nd place Giants), which just goes to show that it’s not exactly an indicator of success… but the worst teams for K’s were the Brewers (1543), Padres (1500), and Rays (1482).

This was a 3-way question, along with walks and ground-into-double-plays.  Still, a majority got this right:  55.9%.  Nicely done.

H4:  Team batting average

.255 was the actual number with a whopping 89.7% thinking that the Braves would exceed .253.  Given the .251 clip from 2015 and the abysmal start to 2016… it’s pretty remarkable that Atlanta got to that number.

H5: Total Team Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) metric

Many were probably thinking that without Andrelton Simmons’ presence, this would go down from 2015.  Most were right… 64.7% figured it would be -17 or worse.  It was pretty ugly:  -37.  Looking forward to getting that back up toward at least the 2015 level next season.

Pitching Questions

P1: Team Record in 1-Run Games

It was 21-22… not quite a Winning record, but darn close.  Most of you chose the optimism route… so only 33.8% got it right.

P2: Number of Pitchers with 10 Wins or More

“None” was the right answer, unfortunately.  Again, only 31.6% guessed pessimis—, uh, correctly.  It would have taken 2 double-digit winners to flip this question… only Folty (9) got that close.

P3: Number of Pitchers with at least 150 innings

“2 or fewer” was correctly guessed by 67.6% of the participants… which makes me wonder if 1/3rd of y’all were paying attention to your answer on the previous question!

P4: Bullpen ERA in 2016

A 3.95 season-long bullpen ERA definitely comes in at “4.00 or lower” and 52.9% got this right… and this was the closest we came to that goal of a 50-50% split on the answers.  We’ll take it!

P5:  Total Number of Pitchers used in 2016.  Was 37 in 2015.

It was 35 in 2016… so the “33 or more” answer was correct.  44.9% agreed and got that tally mark added to their own personal ‘win total’ for this contest.

The Tie-Breakers

TB1:  Date on which Erick Aybar is traded

Largely because of his early play, Aybar stuck around until August 16th – a full 2 weeks+ after the non-waiver trade deadline.  One person in our survey nailed this, but the answers were literally all over the board.

I had expected a lot of answers toward the last 2 couple of weeks in July – and that was the case.  A few dozen people thought that Aybar would not be traded at all, and that skewed the average error to 52 days.  The Median is probably a better indicator here, and that was 33 days… or roughly July 14th.

TB2:  How many of these players will be traded before end of season:  JJohnson, KJohnson, Grilli, Bourn, Markakis, Beckham, Pierzynski, Norris, Chacin?

This ended up being “5 or more” with the average guess being 3.7 of these players being traded (and I would guess that the ‘0.7″ part refers to Pierzynski).  24.3% nailed this one.

TB3:  Highest Finish in Rookie of Year Voting for any Braves’ player

As noted yesterday, the balloting has not been counted, but I believe it is safe to declare that no Braves’ rookie will finish in the Top 5 for ROY, so those answering “Lower than 5th place” get the nod here.

The average answer was between 4th and 5th place, which accounts for a bunch of the correct answers on this one:  47.1%, to be precise.