Why Adam Jones Is A Waste of Talent

Orioles center fielder Adam Jones is a five-tool monster who's led his team to two division crowns, and batted in the .280s with 29+ home runs each of the last three years. He's made four All-Star squads, earned four Gold Gloves and demonstrated the skill of health.

What a waste.

Adam Jones ought to be a superstar. He ought to be hitting over .300 every year and challenging for the MVP. The reason he isn't is this: There are few hitters in MLB with worse approaches at the plate than he. The accomplishments above are a testament entirely to talent absent the leavening of discipline.

Adam Jones has the plate discipline of Chris Christie. He is no more discerning than Beliebers, or people who buy those "starving artist" paintings mass produced in China. No one should ever throw him a pitch in the strike zone.

Consider this one at bat against Sam Freeman of the Rangers Thursday night. With runners on second and third and two outs in a 0-0 game, Freeman offered Jones three straight pitches wide of the strike zone. Jones swung at one. He was lucky he missed, because there was nothing he could have done with it anyway.

Three more pitches off the outside of the plate followed. Jones, evidently failing to catch on, swung at two of them, fouling one off. He had seen six balls, all in the same spot, and gave chase to half of them. 

Jones fouled off two more ever further from the plate before Freeman finally decided to come inside. That pitch nearly hit the batter otherwise who knows what Jones would have attempted.

This is the second time I've seen Adam Jones fed a steady diet of pitches off the plate that he just couldn't lay off. The first time, batting with the bases loaded, he grounded out weakly on a pitch six inches shy of the strike zone. I've seen probably five Jones at bats this season and two of them were appalling.

Or brilliant, depending on your perspective. By constantly fouling off pitches that he shouldn't have been swinging at, Jones forced the pitcher to exhaust nine pitches on a walk. But that was just fortune smiling upon him. In fact, the only way Adam Jones walks is when the pitcher throws him two walks worth of balls.

Last season Jones came to the plate 682 times and coaxed 19 bases on balls. That's 2.8% of his plate appearances, about a third of the league average. His .281 batting average yielded a paltry .311 on base percentage, inflated substantially by 12 HBP. This is a meager result from a hitter with such transcendent skills.

It's worse than that. In the two instances I recount, the hurlers knew they could pump him with junk and let him get himself out. If pitchers were forced into the choice of challenging or walking him, Adam Jones would do more of everything good. He'd hit for a higher average because he'd see some pitches he could handle. He'd hit even more home runs, which is scary for a guy who is again on pace to reach 30. His on base skills could be Pujolsian.

Consider this: if Adam Jones had walked merely at a league average rate last year -- about 8.5% -- he would have made 39 fewer outs. It would have raised his batting average to .300 and OPS by 88 points. (Admittedly, this overstates it slightly because Jones occasionally pokes a hit off a bad pitch or extends an at bat by swinging that later results in a hit. On the other hand, a slugger with his skill set should walk way more than average.) That's absent the salutatory effects of seeing hitters' pitches described above.

Adam Jones has the talent to be Andrew McCutchen. He seems content with his current level of aptitude, which is an order of magnitude less. It's got to drive Orioles fans crazy.

Vlad the Impaled

Watching the playoffs, the saddest thing to see -- after the seeming inevitability of another purchased World Championship for the Yankees -- is the dramatic decline of Vladimir Guerrero. Hitless in his first two games and having whiffed in his previous at-bat on a pitch half a light-year from the strike zone, Guerrero was the last guy the Angels wanted at the plate with the bases juiced and two down in the seventh inning of a tie Game 2.

Guerrero is a lesson in the importance of plate discipline. For 12 years, Vlad the Impaler made mincemeat of Major League pitching by swinging at everything in the same zip code as home plate. From his first full season in 1998 to 2007, Guerrero's lowest OPS was .943 despite Stevie Wonder's batting eye.

There is only way to bat .300 with power while swinging at everything but the pick-off move: possess mad skills. Vlad was so endowed. However...

Starting last year, his 33rd on Planet Earth, Guerrero's skills began to erode. His OPS the last two seasons slumped to .886 and .794, and he's failed to hit 30 home runs each of the last three years. His value, as compared to a replacement-level player at his position dropped from a high of seven wins, accomplished several times, to about one-and-a-half win in 2009.

To be fair, Vlad missed a third of the season this year. On the other hand, he DH'd almost exclusively. Counter-intuitively, the replacement level hitter at DH is actually weaker than at right-fielder.

Guerrero's problem is that he can no longer compensate for his miserable plate discipline with an uncanny ability to hit everything. Pitchers know they can make bad pitches, and as long as they're not hugging the plate, they can get him out.

That's what was on display when he batted against a suspect Joba Chamberlain in Game 2. In 45-degree temperatures, Joba had come into the game one batter earlier and issued a free pass to the previous batter. But Guerrero swung at all four pitches he saw -- two of them balls -- and struck out, leaving three runners aboard.

The prognosis for Vladimir Guerrero in 2010 is pretty poor. Time waits for no one, and it doesn't appear that he's learned anything about how to hit. It's a shame too, becuse he was on a Hall of Fame trajectory had he only improved on the one glaring weakness in his game.

Plus, he could have helped beat the Yankees.
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