I am really glad that I am finally getting a chance to sit down and write about some players. I would like to appologize for the lack of posts from myself, but life has gotten in the way as of late. However, I must give credit to the rest of the writting staff here at fantasy Gameday. They have provided some outstanding content while I have been unable to contribute regularly over the past few weeks. Enough of the sensless chatter.

Tonight I wanted to take a look at Andruw Jones and his terrible, ok… HORRIFIC start to the season. If you know me, you know that I cannot stand a player that hits below .260. Also, if you have been reading the site, you know that I called Jones’ performance at the beginning of last year a trend and not a slump. Obviously, Jones has trended the wrong way for well over a year. So what do owners do with him at this point? Can you get anything for him in a trade? Do you just simply drop him?

Let’s first put his key stats side by side:

BB% 9.8 (05), 12.7 (06), 10.9 (07), 13.2 (08)

So his walk rate have fluctuated over the past four years, but not enough to cause alarm. In fact his lowest walk rate was during the same season that he hit 51 homeruns.

K% 19.1 (05), 22.5% (06), 24.1 (07), 33.9 (08)

Yikes! That is an awful trend to have over the past four years. That type of strikeout rate increase usually gets a player benched regularly. The worst part about it… He strikeouts more then twice as often then he walks. This also means he doesn’t put the ball in play 34% of the time (66% contact rate).

So far he looks like a piece of crap, but let’s normalize some of his stats, and see where he ends up. For argument sake, I will take the average over the past four years for key stats. If you take his BABIP and up it from this years .247 and “normalize” to a .252 mark, his average climbs in a very small increment. He has a 43% flyball rate for this year, which is identical to his average over the past four years. So we will leave that alone. Now take his HR/FB rate from the anemic 3.1% to his four year average of 15.90%. What do you get? A total of 5 homeruns and a whopping average of .200. Even Bill Hall has done better then that.

I know that is a lot of statistical information crammed into a tiny space, but I think you are getting the picture… Andruw Jones is terrible, and will not be getting any better until he brings up his contact rate. So now the question revolves around what you should do with him if you own him. In shallow leagues, he needs to be cut immediately, and that also goes for 12-team leagues that have only 3 outfield spots. In deeper leagues, I would trade him for a warm body, or at the very least, bench him indefinitely.