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Saturday, May 26, 2007
Contract year turning sour for Andruw
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The way Andruw Jones is going, he might not be beyond the Braves’ price range this winter. Then again …
The way he’s going, the Braves might not consider him indispensable anymore.
Since nobody has ever known what Andruw Rudolph Jones is apt to do at any given moment, it’s risky to look five minutes ahead, let alone five months. But April and May haven’t gone the way any player in a contract year would script, and June will see publication of a book by the justifiably esteemed Jayson Stark that identifies Jones as “the most overrated center fielder of all time.”
The demon agent Scott Boras will still demand massive money for a 30-year-old who has won nine Gold Gloves and who hit a franchise-record 51 homers two years ago. Figure $18 million per season as a baseline. (Asked if Boras ever asks for less than you’d think, John Schuerholz almost laughed before saying, “Oh, no.”)
But here’s the bigger question, bigger even than Boras and his reputation: Is Jones still the player he was in 2005, or is he, as Stark uses diminishing defensive data to suggest, an athlete on the clear decline?
It was only two summers ago we were toasting Andruw’s breakthrough season. We’d waited for nearly a decade, and finally it arrived — a league-leading 51 homers and 128 RBIs. Last year brought more of the same, albeit with 10 fewer home runs, and seemed to furnish further evidence Jones had ascended to a higher level. But now, sad to say, the old puzzling Andruw is back with a vengeance.
In 48 games Jones is hitting .215 with 17 more strikeouts than hits. He struck out five times against Boston last Sunday. He has one home run in May.
Is this just another of Andruw’s infamous downturns, or is it something worse? Said Bobby Cox, ever chipper: “I’ve seen him in slumps before, and he’s always come out of them and will be carrying the team on his shoulders.”
Might the weight of impending free agency be pressing down? Terry Pendleton, the hitting coach who was once a free agent himself, said he didn’t think it was “until last week in Boston, when I thought, ‘Maybe it is bugging him.’ At times it seems he does try to do more. He does have pride: In this business we all do — that’s how we got where we are. And you do tend to hear negative things.”
True to his famously serene self, Jones doesn’t see these latest flailings as anything significant. “I’m seeing the ball pretty good,” he said Friday night. “I had one bad game in Boston and people made a big deal about it.”
Does he worry about where he might next year? “I don’t think about that. I’m playing baseball right now. I’m doing whatever I can to help the team however I can.”
Jones stroked a double off Jamie Moyer in the second inning Friday, one of his two extra-base hits in the last dozen games. He has struck out 18 times in those last 12 games. Cox has dropped Jones in the order, a major concession for the patron saint of loyalty. Still, it’s important to note that this is Andruw Jones, which means things are seldom as they seem for very long.
He had an 0-for-28 stretch in April 2005 and was hitting .239 at month’s end. He wound up second to Albert Pujols in the MVP voting. It might well be that, as Stark suggests, he’s coasting on his reputation as a defender. (Frankly, the Braves’ Andruw-saves-a-run-a-game claims were always fanciful.) But to dismiss him altogether would be wildly premature.
He has looked bad before and will look bad again. That’s just Andruw being Andruw. Boras is going to find some team willing to meet his price — that’s why Boras is Boras — and that price will surely be too high for the Braves. And then they’ll find another center fielder, and he won’t be as good as this one.
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