Ranking Adam Jones

by
December 25, 2014

On Tuesday, I released my very preliminary rankings for the 2015 draft season. Things will change – really, they will. Until then, we’re left with some odd observations to discuss. I acknowledged my uber-bullish ranking of Carlos Carrasco on Little Christmas, and my bearish ranking of Adam Jones shall provide the content for normal Christmas. Enjoy.

The comments in the rankings piece alerted me to the possibility I had skimped with Jones. He came in as the 21st ranked outfielder. Without any stats on a page – just names – I see nothing out of the ordinary including him in a cohort with Matt Holliday, Kole Calhoun, Yoenis Cespedes, and Brandon Moss. Those seem like fine companions for a hyper-aggressive hitter with whiff issues.

Neither of those qualities are my chief concern with Jones. Any hitter with whiff problems should consider hyper-aggression as a solution. Especially if the hitter is comfortable varying his levels of aggression (which is NOT the case with Jones). That can help to avoid the Pablo Sandoval Effect (formerly the Vladimir Guerrero Effect) where opposing pitchers throw mostly balls.

My true concern is secondary to those traits – any decrease in quality of contact could result in a steep decrease in results. Jones has been remarkably steady in recent seasons – anybody would take his 88/29/96/7/.281 fantasy line from last season. The difficulty is how comfortable I feel about continued consistency as he drifts into his decline years. He’s just 29 now, so maybe it’s too early to worry.

The low(ish) ranking all comes down to a series of guesses.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.
  • He won’t age well
  • His skill set has little margin for error
  • A little issue or injury could cause a precipitous drop

I could be way off base with those presumptions. And you know what, that’s completely fine. I may adjust Jones up my draft board slightly in the next revision, but I believe it to be important to trust my instincts and preferences. You shouldn’t take mine or any one set of rankings as gospel. Ideally, you’ll use other rankings to help form your own specific to your league and preferences. And if you’re not comfortable making your own, a composite can help.





 

You can follow me on twitter @BaseballATeam

37 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Nelson S.
10 years ago

Counting stats are also very important for Jones (for everyone obviously) so without Markakis, or Cruz, but hopefully bouncebacks from Davis, Machado, itll be interesting to see how the line-up around him plays out and if he can get to 180 R+RBI again

0