James Jones Comparables

Originally published 7/19/14

In a recent post, I discussed how, unfortunately, we need to be a little more realistic about James Jones. He’s considered one of the major positive surprises so far for the 2014 Mariners, but in reality, his total career performance to date has been somewhat below-average.

Okay. But, he’s young. He can only improve from here, right?

Let’s answer this question as objectively as possible. Let’s find the players who, historically, began their careers most similarly to Jones. And let’ see how their careers panned out.

I went back through the list of hitters classified as rookies, since 1955. (1955 is when the intentional base on balls became reliably recorded and is therefore a common place to begin historical look-backs.)

Since 1955, a total of 4,691 position players (i.e. non-pitchers) were classified as rookies and had a qualifying number of ABs. Of those, 200 players had a K%, BB% and ISO all within 1 standard deviation of Jones’. We will examine the career fWAR (Fangraphs wins-above-replacement) for all 200 players in a moment.

But first, why did I select K%, BB% and ISO? Why not batting average, home runs, stolen bases or slugging percentage, for example?

Because BB%, K% and ISO are highly correlated to offensive performance, and because they stabilize very fast. That means we don’t need to worry about smaller sample sizes.

For example, ISO stabilizes after about 160 ABs. K% and BB% stabilize after 60PAs and 120 PAs, respectively. To date, Jones has 250 career ABs and 264 PAs.

So, already at this point in his career, it’s not reasonable to assume Jones’ core hitting metrics will drastically change.

Okay, so let’s go back to these 200 players – the close comparables to Jones.

Here is a chart showing these 200 players’ career fWAR:

The fWAR above are ordered from high (+72.3 fWAR – Rod Carew) to low (-7.1 fWAR – Vic Harris).

The 100th and 101st players are at the median of the distribution.  The median players totaled +1.0 fWAR each. The median players are Mike Phillips and Donovan Solano. If we only have one guess in a given data set, we should guess the median player. So, best guess, James Jones will amount to Mike Phillips or Donovan Solano. I had never heard of these two players until I did this blog post. I’m sure they’re great guys, but they weren’t anywhere close to average major leaguers.

James Jones could be Rod Carew one day – a Hall of Famer. Statistically, there is about 0.5% chance of it (1 in 200). Or Jones could be some guy that not a lot of people ever hear about.

Only 46 of the 200 players ever achieved more than +10 fWAR.  An average major leaguer produces +2 fWAR per season.  In other words, there is a 23% chance that Jones’ career contribution is larger than 5 seasons of an average MLB player. There is a 77% chance that his career amounts to less than that.

Being 100% serious – that’s not bad. Average players can contribute to great teams. And, average is a lot better than people expected from Jones. Jones’ attitude appears to be awesome. He plays the game tough. He notably sat down with Manager Lloyd McClendon to ask how he could improve his game. I, personally, want Jones to succeed, very badly. The Mariners have had so many position players bust in recent years. Can Jones be an exception? Yes, of course. But we absolutely should not expect that to happen. We can’t even expect him to be average, in the long run.