Atlanta Braves: 2015 End of Season Player Grades
By Kevin Floody
The World Series is over. The off-season is upon us. Many Atlanta Braves fans are ready to look ahead, speculate about the upcoming moves, and forget about the 2015 season in general.
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The Falcons are—actually scratch that. The Hawks are in full swing and playing well and people have moved on from last year’s Braves, but not so fast. In this time of eager anticipation, it is useful to pause, take a minute and evaluate the past season. There are some players who got playing time in this past season and made the most of it. There are others who let us down and were a disappointment. Let’s take a moment to evaluate some of the seasons had by key members of the club, specifically those that get paid to hit. Pitchers will come later. It’s a lot of work (and at times depressing) to go back through each player. So keep on a lookout for the pitchers, they just won’t be in this piece.
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Of course, there is hardly a perfect way to quantify this grading, so the best we can do is my analysis followed by my arbitrary assignment of a letter grade. The keyword there is arbitrary, so feel free to disagree. At a certain point it becomes a matter of opinion. But hopefully you will read and appreciate the reasoning behind my conclusions. Obviously some players have been left off simply due to relevance. There’s no point in grading Alberto Callaspo, Eric Young, or Phil Gosselin. I can’t make a ranking of every single player to take the field in an Atlanta Braves jersey this year. That would be insane. So I stuck to players that had expectations, or that simply stood out as exceptionally good/bad.
An important thing to remember is that each player has a unique situation and thus are not judged equally. A superstar who had a mediocre season will receive a poor game, while a bench player who was critical and played above his predicted ceiling will receive a strong grade, even if that player’s numbers were still worse than those of the superstar. Feel free to disagree and let me know why in the comments. I am always up for a good discussion. Anyway, without further ado, here are my end-of-season grades for the 2015 Atlanta Braves hitters.
Next: Role Players