We recently completed a series on ranking the Atlanta Braves starting position players vs. the rest of the NL East. Except there’s a bit of unfinished business.
The Atlanta Braves stack up well on paper, but that doesn’t always help, as we saw displayed on Thursday. Let’s review the rankings we’ve made now that the regular seasons is now underway and see what we might have already learned… or what might already have changed.
Here’s the links to the original pieces:
Now here’s how we ranked each team’s starting player (or tandem of players) at each position from the NL East:
- C – PHL / WAS / NYM / ATL / MIA
- 1B – ATL / PHL / NYM / WAS / MIA
- 2B – ATL / NYM / PHL / WAS / MIA
- 3B – WAS / ATL / NYM / MIA / PHL
- SS – WAS / PHL / ATL / NYM / MIA
- LF – ATL / WAS / NYM / PHL / MIA
- CF – WAS / ATL / NYM / PHL / MIA
- RF – PHL / NYM / WAS / ATL / MIA
Now – let’s take the extra step or two: I will blind assign points to each ranking position and tallying them up to determine how the teams fare all together (5 points for 1st, 4 for second… etc).
So a perfect score would be 40 points… the worst 8.
- ATL  – 3 1sts, 2 2nds, 1 3rd, 2 4ths. 30 points.
- MIA – 1 4th and 7 5th. 9 points.
- NYM – 2 2nds, 5 3rds, 1 4th. 25 points.
- PHL – 2 1sts, 2 2nds, 1 3rd, 2 4ths. 25 points.
- WAS – 3 1sts, 2 2nds, 1 3rd, 2 4ths. 30 points.
I admit up front that there are different ways in which you could choose to quibble about these ratings:
- Maybe the evenly-spaced points don’t account for the real-life gaps that do exist in some of these matchups … for example, Rendon and Donaldson are quite a distance above the rest of the third basemen in the NL East.
- Maybe you didn’t like using Fangraphs’ WAR as a means of ranking performance… or you didn’t like some of our projections in general.
- Heck, maybe you just think that somebody needed to be ranked a little higher or lower, period. That’s okay… I get that… this can be used as a framework for comparisons and doesn’t have to be accepted as any sort of gospel truth.
Your Mileage May Vary
A five point differential can be explained away at the end of the season in a variety of ways: injuries… an unusually poor performance… an unusually good performance… a trade to either obtain or divest a player.
So yes:Â the Braves and Nationals came out on top in this exercise and seem to be relatively even overall.
Digging a little deeper, I would probably give a slight advantage to the Nationals because they are…
- Slightly behind in LF
- Slightly ahead at 3B
- Have a strong advantage at CF, SS, C
- Braves are much better at 1B; are ahead at 2B as well, but not enough to cancel the margins at C/CF/SS
Regardless of the argument – and in all honesty, I started this today with the thought that there might be some changes – there truly isn’t a lot of room between these teams positionally.
So in seeing how close things are overall, there frankly doesn’t seem to be a lot of point to making any changes… certainly not at this point in the season and certainly also because these teams will be motivated to fill their own holes and gaps as the season progresses.
At least that’s what we’d hope… that the Atlanta Braves would also be motivated to fix a hole or two, right?