January 25, 2008
Team Offense, Atlanta Braves
We continue to look at team offenses for 2008 with the Atlanta Braves.
Yunel Escobar
Photo: Icon SMI
In 2007, the Braves scored 5.00 runs per game.
I plugged in a likely lineup to the Lineup Analysis Tool, using the Marcel the Monkey predictions from Tom Tango. The lineups rate as follows:
- Best: 5.37 runs per game
- Given: 5.18 runs per game
- Worst: 4.77 runs per game
The Braves get a full year of Yunel Escobar and Mark Teixeira, which helps push the offense up. I addition, Kelly Johnson, Brian McCann, and Jeff Francoeur are expected to improve. Interestingly, the team replaced Andruw Jones with Mark Kotsay, who is about as bad offensively as Jones was in 2007. They're just not paying him a ton of money. They should have no problems scoring runs with six very good hitters and a good power hitter in Jeff Francoeur.
Previous teams covered in the series:
Dave, how about putting the links to previous teams in run-scoring order? It would be nice to see where they all stack up without having to read the posts again.
They are in 2007 r/g order. I suppose I could put the value of the given lineup next to the team.
I think there's an issue of comparing the runs scored last year to the runs given by the lineup tool due to rest days. Obviously there will be injuries which will lower the run total, but even given a fully healthy club, the starting 9 won't get every at-bat during the season due to days off. Especially on a team where the catcher is as good as McCann, there's going to be quite a bit of dropoff when the backup backstop is playing. Mention Wil Nieves to any Yankee fan and you'll hear about it.
