Andruw Jones

Hello Reddit - my name is Andruw Jones. I am a former Braves center-fielder and played in Major League Baseball for 17 years for the Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox, and New York Yankees. I am excited to talk about this Braves team and can’t wait to see what they do this postseason.

I am now currently retired from professional baseball but I now work as a Special Assistant to the GM for the Braves and I have just announced a partnership with an Atlanta based Daily Fantasy Sports company named PrizePicks - you can find more information over at !

Edit: Andruw has to get going to get ready for tonight's game. He will answer some more questions tomorrow as well.

Hi everyone! Your Braves AMA person it seems like. I am thrilled to announce that our very own Andruw Jones will be doing an AMA tomorrow at 10 AM ET over on . When it's live I will make sure to post it on here but I wanted everyone to have a heads up so you can think of the perfect question for him!

It will, hopefully, be the starting point of a series of AMAs featuring Braves alumni. I will have more details on that in the near future.

It’s the middle of the holidays. We haven’t gotten much news to be excited about this off-season other than the McGriff HOF news (and Murphy of course!). So let’s continue to track our other possible ‘23 HOF’er. Per released ballots, Andruw has a decent chance this year (around 68% so far). You can track announced ballots here:

What say you? Is this (finally) Andruw’s year?

For the last few months people have been complaining about Kirby Puckett and Andruw Jones not getting cards for their high tier diamonds. Do you guys think SDS is in a lose lose situation here? They could give them cards but if they’re not cracked out of their minds then people will call it an L but if they don’t drop them then every post is about those two specifically. What stats would you think those two cards would need to satisfy the players?

I’ve been watching the ballots being posted in for the HoF and with the exception of one, keep seeing Andruw Jones votes. Has anyone noted how many he has at this point compared to past years? What do y’all think?

I made a post about this about a year ago on an old account and really just want to revisit the argument after recently seeing some articles and conversations about the topic.

INTRO

A lot of people brought up good points why Andruw was "good but not great" and I get a lot of where they're coming from:

• His career was pretty short

• Gold Gloves aren't that important

• Was he actually the best defender at his position?

When you break it down, my reasons were:

• 10 Gold Gloves (1 of 16 total players with 10+) and arguably the best defensive CF of all time

• 400+ HR (1 of 56 players)

• 1 of 4 players with both 10 GG and 400+ HRs.

NEW INFO

So today I was reading an article on Barstool Sports (yeah sometimes they suck), but this one was titled Fuck Your Numbers, Andruw Jones is a Hall of Famer. The writer talked about how if Andruw was going to get knocked for falling off sooner than most, then he should get credit for being great sooner than a lot of HOFers.

Fuck it I'll say it, Andruw Jones is the best defensive CFer in baseball history.

I don't care if he was only good for 10 years. But for those 10 years he was a better defensive CFer than any other CFer ever.

I know DRAA isn't the only defensive stat, but to be 93 defensive runs above average more than the second guy is a big deal. (and not just at CF, but all OFers ever) He's also 22nd All-Time in dWAR.

He had a better 10 year stretch than many HOFers did in their 15-20 year career. You can't knock one of the greatest CFers ever for being great for a decade at one of the most physically demanding positions.

"158 games played, 35 homers & 104 RBIs, .266/.344/.503 hitting slash line for an OPS of .847. 3.7 Offensive WAR, 2.4 Defensive WAR (6.1 total)."

That was his average season over 10 seasons on one of the best teams.

"Before his production rapidly declined upon turning 30, Jones produced MLB's third-best from 1998-2007. The two players who ranked ahead of him within this span were Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez."

CONCLUSION

I believe this will be his last year on the ballot since he only received 7.5% of votes last year and you need at least 5% to stay on, but I felt the need to write this up for the player that made me fall in love with baseball to show that he deserves to be among the greats in Cooperstown. I think a lot of people remember him for his disappointing years following the Braves, and I do think his stats get overshadowed by some of the best players baseball has seen who played during his time (Albert Pujols, Ichiro, ARod, Barry Bonds, and Ken Griffey Jr. to name a few) But people can't forget that he was one of the best players in baseball for 10 years.

Growing up watching baseball in the 90’s and early 2000’s by far Andruw Jones was the best CF/ OF defensively in the game. The disrespect at 60% for the MLB HOF smh 🤦🏽‍♂️ He’s the true “NO FLY ZONE” this man played press coverage and took away the deep ball. A pleasure to watch and always smiling. One of my favorites all time. Met him and got an autograph when I was 11 one of the best childhood/ baseball moments of my life. Congrats AJ25 You deserve more!!!

The official 2018 ballot for Hall of Fame voting includes 19 first timers.*

Some of these players will make the hall, some will not, and some will be gone after one year of voting. I've decided to take a look at all of them, from the bottom up.

Past episodes: , , , , . Izzy has links to the rest, 'cause ain't nobody got time for that.

And now, without further ado...

Andruw Jones

Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor: 109

Career bWAR (17 years): 62.8

Stats: .254/.337/.486, 434 HR, 1289 RBI, 1204 R, 111 OPS+

Awards: All-Star x5 (2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006), Gold Glove x10 (1998-2007), Silver Slugger (OF, 2005), TSN Player of the Year (2005), NL Hank Aaron Award (2005)

League Leading Stats: Games (162, 1999), PA (729, 2000), AB (656, 2000), HR (51, 2005), RBI (128, 2005)

Teams Played For: Braves (1996-2007), Dodgers (2008), Rangers (2009), White Sox (2010), Yankees (2011-2012)

On the , I posed the question “would Sandy Koufax still be a Hall of Famer if his career arc had been reversed?” The closest we may ever get to an answer quite possibly comes in the form of Andruw Jones.

Breaking into the league as a 19 year old, Jones proceeded to slash .400/.500/.750 with two home runs and six RBI in the 1996 World Series against the Yankees. The next year, he finished 5th in ROY voting (finishing behind fellow first-time ballot members and ROY ). The year after that, as a 21 year old, Jones embarked on a nearly decade-long stretch of genuinely excellent baseball.

During that span (1998-2006), Jones slashed .270/.347/.513 with 627 XBH (319 HR), 9 Gold Gloves and five All-Star appearances, playing in a whopping 53 post season games along the way. If he could have found a way to stop striking out 125 times a year, he could have been a .280 hitter for his career and we probably wouldn’t be having the rest of this conversation.

But then, in just his age 30 season, somebody snuck into Atlanta in the middle of the night, stole Jones’ usable parts and left him up on cinder blocks. He still managed 26 HR, 94 RBI and his 10th Gold Glove in 2007, but he did it at the cost of a .222/.311/.413 slash and an 87 OPS+.

At the time, Atlanta was still the smartest team in the room, and when Jones’ contract was up at the end of the ’07 season, they walked away without so much as a parting gift for his years of service. Signing with Los Angeles, just about everyone expected Jones to show that the previous season had been nothing but a blip on the radar. Turns out, 2007 was the high water mark for the rest of his career.

As bad as Jones had been during his last season in a Braves uni, just about everything that came after was measurably worse. From 2008-2012, Jones managed to bribe his way into 435 major league ballgames, giving the teams he played for a combined .210/.316/.424 slash with 121 XBH and a 95 OPS+. He finished two of those seasons with batting averages under .200.

In 2008, Jones showed up to Spring Training 20 lbs overweight; a situation he decided to be more or less fine with for the rest of his career. After signing a two year deal with LA, Jones only made it into 75 ballgames. In those 75 games as a member of the Dodgers, he put up an OPS+ of 35. Thirty-goddamn-five. That’s a number that is so low, it makes me irrationally angry just to look at. His ’08 OBP of .256 would have qualified as the 59th highest batting average that season.

Like some kind of perverse Cinderella, the minute Jones turned 30, he was basically done. And the biggest fuck you about the whole thing? Who the hell knows why. Sure, he was out of shape a lot, but even when he was in relatively good condition, he couldn’t really put it together again. His power was still good – he averaged a home run every 15.5 AB for the last four years of his career — but nothing else seemed to work quite right, and teams just didn’t feel comfortable giving him a huge number of games. As a result, thanks to the wonder of sample sizes, Jones was basically the most usefully useless player in the league: from ’09-’11, Jones finished with a 114 OPS+ while slashing .228/.338/.478.

So why are we even here? Well, Jones still finished his career with 434 homers, and was arguably the greatest defensive outfielder of all time, retiring with 24.1 dWAR; the highest all-time total among outfielders, and the 20th highest mark in ML history, regardless of position. He was a 5+ WAR player six times in his career, including a remarkable run from 1998-2000 where he was good for 22.7 WAR. His highest BBRef Similarity Score is Dale Murphy; a fellow Brave, and a two-time MVP and five-time Gold Glove winner who should probably be in the Hall himself already.

But it very likely will not be enough. Nowhere near it, in fact: Jones is currently muddling around at 5.1% of the vote, and is a real danger of not seeing the light of day once the final tally is in. There are undoubtedly a great number of people who don’t believe that Jones is a Hall of Famer. But which would be the bigger travesty: Jones making the Hall someday, or Jones joining the likes of Jorge Posada and Kenny Lofton as great players who only got one season of consideration?

Jones played for five teams in his 17 year career, but was basically just a Brave. As such, he goes into the Hypothetical Hall with Atlanta's logo on his head, finishing the Braves portion of his career with a .263/.342/.497 slash, 368 home runs, 113 OPS+, 10 Gold Gloves and five All-Star appearances.

Chances of Making the Hall: Shit man, I don’t even know anymore

Odds of leaving the ballot in his first year: 50%

*The official ballot contains 19 new players, but 27 technically qualified and I started before the official ballot was announced, so we're going over by a couple. Sorry.