Scouting Report: Adam Jones

Scouting Repot: Adam Jones

            If I were to say, “Today I’m going to look at one of baseball elite OF today,” whom would you think of?  Ryan Braun?  Mike Trout?  Andrew McCutchen?  Well I’m going to talk about the unsung hero of Baltimore who most people know about but few regard as one of baseballs best, at least among the common fans.  Adam Jones has been producing at elite level for a few years now and its time we take a look at him.

Batting:

            Adam Jones’ slash line last year looks like this: .285/.318/.493.  This put him in the top 20 OF in BA and top 10 in SLG, he quietly had a very strong year.  Then you look at that OBP and shack your head since he doesn’t even fit in the top 50 OF who qualified (min 500 PA) in baseball, which leads to the first real problem with Jones, his inability to get on base.  Last year Jones had a K% of 19.7%, which is higher than his career norms and actually broke the trend he had for the last few years where he had been able to reduce the K%.  It doesn’t help that his BB% was a career low at only 3.6%, which is a full 1% lower than his career total.  To be fair though the average K% for the last 5 years has been 19% so he’s not striking out too much more than the other batters.  Where you start to see some signs is the O-Swing% and Z-Swing%; his O-Swing percent is sitting at 41.3% meaning he swings at just under half the pitches he sees that are outside the zone which is almost 20% higher than league average while his O-Contact% is at 63.7%.  That at least is a good thing; it shows that he can actually hit the balls he swings at outside the zone.  The Z-Swing% is exactly as you’d suspect from looking at the O-Swing%; he swings at 78% of the pitches in the zone and that’s well above league average.  He makes contact at 82% of those swings, which is just slightly below league average, the average being 87%.  So what we gather form this is he swings a lot and he misses many of the swings.

            The best way to look at this is Jones swings a lot and he tries to put the ball in play to force the fielders to get him out.  That tends to make him vulnerable to the strike out from time to time but more importantly it means he just doesn’t like taking a walk.  So the big question is if he swings the bat a lot and he has a well above average BA what’s the trade off from all those swings, power, and lots of it.  Last year Jones had a SLG of .490, which is 30 points higher than his career total SLG of .460 and it’s actually down from last years total of .503.  His ISO is also above average sitting at .208, about 50 points higher that the league average.  To his credit its not all HR’s either, which his speed Jones can stretch many singles to doubles giving his team better chances to win.  That speed doesn’t fully translate to the SB total but it doesn’t always need to but he still had an UBR (Ultimate Base Running) total of 5.1, which was a career high.  In the end Jones has tools to spare but he isn’t an all around hitter.

Defense:

            Honestly not his strong suite, which actually accounts for him having such a low WAR last year given how good his end of season totals were.  WAR does account for a players overall value and while it can be split but in the end its still tallied all together.  His rPM (runs Plus or Minus) last year had him at -9 putting him 9% worse than league average.  The limited speed I had mentioned earlier also shows up when looking at the plays he makes versus the ones he doesn’t or can’t make.  According to Insider Edge Jones made about 50% of catches they deemed “unlikely” which looking at other CF’s is not super low but the number of plays he made (6) was low.  His RngR (Range runs above average) has him at -13.2 and his UZR puts him at -6.8. Not terrible but compared to most CF its pretty low, I would not be surprised that sometime in the near future we see a shift to LF for him.

            All in all Adam Jones has flaws but he is still an elite hitter, hitting for that much power and still being able to get on base is a very big task and he does it better than anyone.  Now if he could take a walk more often we could look at one of the best hitting OF in the game.