Issue 3: The Best Defender I've Ever Seen

"You just take it for granted."

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Before I started working for Baseball America, I spent two summers as an intern with MLB.com where I got to help cover the Braves in 2015 and the Padres in 2016.¹ That Braves team finished 67-95 and had the worst record for the organization in my lifetime and the Padres team the next summer was only one win better at 68-94.

At first glance you might think I got rotten luck with those assignments, but I don’t think so. I got to live in San Diego for a summer in 2016 and watch baseball games at Petco Park on a nightly basis. That year I also covered All Star weekend, which included seeing Giancarlo Stanton in the home run derby and talking to Miguel Cabrera, who was a childhood favorite as someone who got to see him in the minors with the Carolina Mudcats.

As for the Braves, that was the team I mostly grew up watching and Turner Field was also the first big league stadium I went to. While the Braves were generally pretty terrible that season, I was able to watch a few iconic players. Freddie Freeman will be remembered as the best player from that dubious roster, but I think I’ll remember watching Andrelton Simmons more fondly.

This was right in the middle of his defensive peak and, at least according to Baseball-Reference, Simmons (4.5 bWAR) was the most valuable player on the team since Freeman (3.0 bWAR) played in only 118 games. You might have missed it over the holidays, but Simmons recently announced his retirement from baseball after an 11-year major league career.

Simmons is the best defensive player I’ve seen and I think he has a case as one of the best defenders in baseball history. That makes his abrupt decline and generally quiet exit from the game sad. I wonder how we will remember Simmons 10, 20, 30 years from now?

He was far from a strong offensive player. Simmons had just three seasons where he was a league-average or better hitter and finished his career with a .263/.312/.366 slash line with 70 home runs, an 87 OPS+ and 86 wRC+. After the 2018 season it was a pretty rapid decent in productivity:

The offensive side of the game is more important, and it certainly seems like history has a better memory for offense than defense. After all, you can’t exactly pull up his defensive highlights as easily as you can scowl through his hitting numbers on B-Ref.

Still, I think Simmons is someone who should be remembered fondly because his defensive brilliance was so exceptional, so otherworldly, that it was worth going to watch a crappy Braves team in Georgia in the middle of July because there was always a chance he would do something you had never seen before.

I tried to look back at some of the articles I wrote about Simmons that summer in 2015, and one I stumbled upon featured Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez pushing for him to be an All-Star after a game where he had another nonchalant difficult play that helped clinch a rare victory. Simmons wasn’t an All-Star that season. He never earned a single All-Star appearance in his career, which seems crazy to me, especially since he is a player who managed to finish top-15 in MVP voting in three separate seasons.

In his 11-year stretch from 2012-2022 Simmons was the 10th most valuable shortstop according to fWAR (25.0), but Baseball-Reference has a much rosier view of him in that stretch and places him second behind only Carlos Correa (39.5 bWAR) with 37.3 bWAR.

Whatever side of that spectrum you are more in agreement with, there’s no doubting how fun he was to watch play the game. The career highlight video MLB put out (shown above) shortly after his retirement is more than 10 minutes long and even then there were specific plays I remembered that weren’t included.

My favorite Andrelton Simmons defensive highlight was from a Braves game against the Brewers on May 23, 2015. This must have been before I started working as an intern that year because I have no memory of this play in person. It was a 2-2 game in the top of the ninth with two outs and Jason Rogers on first base as the potential go-ahead run. Luis Sardinas singled to right field, Rogers made the turn around second to head to third and then-Braves right field Nick Markakis came up firing (well, did he have the arm to really fire?) to third.

In the baseline between second and third, Simmons made the cut, did a deft pivot and quickly fired (we know he had the arm to fire), not to third, but first base where he put the ball essentially right on the bag and caught Sardinas wandering just a few feet too far off the bag on his turn. Bang, bang. Inning over. The Braves eventually won in extras.

You need to watch this play and you can if you check the 2:45 mark in the video below.

I think it’s the ultimate representation of the things that made him the best defensive player I’ve seen: arm strength, body control and defensive instincts.

I could go on about Simmons. Essentially the entirety of my Twitter history mentioning him is just me gushing about one play or another that he made. I could talk about how he was robbed of a Gold Glove award in 2015 because Brandon Crawford was the better hitter. I could talk about his six consecutive Fielding Bible awards (still a record!). I could talk about how he’s one of seven players to accumulate 200 or more fielding runs, most of whom are either Hall of Famers or Andruw Jones (don’t get me started on his HoF case):

1. Brooks Robinson, 293

2. Mark Belanger, 241

3. Ozzie Smith, 239

4. Andruw Jones, 235

5. Adrian Beltre, 216

6. Roberto Clemente, 205

7. Andrelton Simmons, 200

I could mention that Simmons joined this list with just 1,225 big league games and mention the fact that all the other six players had at least 2,000. Or how about a smaller list of just two players who have amassed 200 or more defensive runs saved: Simmons (201) and Adrian Beltre (200).

I could keep going but this newsletter is already too long, so I won’t. Eight years ago in that story I got to write, Fredi Gonzalez made a comment about how Simmons’ ability to make incredibly difficult plays look easy and routine meant that you often took them for granted.

Hopefully we all didn’t take Andrelton Simmons for granted.

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Here’s everything I produced for Baseball America last week:

Writing

• Plotting Power, Contact & Chase Rates For Top 2024 College Hitters — We have more datapoints and under-the-hood analytical measures with amateur players than ever before. I could not have imagined being able to do a piece like this with draft prospects when I started covering the draft for BA back in 2017, but this is now the second year I’ve been able to dig into exit velocities, contact rates and chase rates for some of the top hitters in the class. It’s nice to visualize, and it also can help contextualize how the top hitters in the class stack up. Plus, there’s always a player or two who really jump out on this scatterplot and make you think: “Hey, should this guy rank a lot higher than he currently does?” Last year those players were Nolan Schanuel and Gino Groover. This year that seems to be Cole Mathis.

Podcasting

• Don’t Sleep On Cole Mathis And Other Non-Power 5 Prospects To Know — Peter Flaherty and I talk through some of the pieces we wrote this week and dig into a few small conference prospect who are names to know for the 2024 class.

• Future Projection Episode 74: Everything You Need To Know About The 2024 International Class — Tomorrow is January 15, which is the day players from the 2024 International Class can sign contracts with big league teams. Ben Badler is the expert on international prospects, and I basically spent this podcast asking him about the top names to know, the state of the international system, which organizations have been cleaning up in the market, and more. Ben also expanded his 2024 International Big Board from 50 players to 100 a few days ago.

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Here are a few other stories you might find interesting:

• Which MLB Teams Are The Best And Worst At Drafting Pitchers? — JJ Cooper follows up on his hitting study from a year ago and this time looks into the success rates of big league teams when it comes to arms. The Cardinals and Brewers are big winners here for different reasons, and while I think the Brewers do have a great reputation for their work with pitching, I am not so sure St. Louis has gotten the credit they actually deserve. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the A’s and the Pirates. The Pirates would be particularly concerning because their current farm system is largely built on pitching, and they also just made Paul Skenes the first overall pick and gave him the biggest signing bonus ever.

• 10 Top MLB Draft Prospects From Non-Power 5 Conference Programs — Each year we’re frequently asked about the best prospects from smaller conferences or schools and Peter Flaherty takes a crack at highlighting some of the best such names in the 2024 class in this piece. I am a particular fan of righthander Matt Ager and the previously mentioned Cole Mathis of this group, and it wouldn’t shock me if Sam Houston State catcher Walker Janek pushed further up boards this spring as well.

• College Baseball Tweaked The NCAA Tournament Selection Process. But Will It Change Anything? — If you didn’t know already, you’ll quickly find that I am much more interested in the specific players than the horse race of college baseball in this space, but Teddy Cahill gives some insight into a few small changes in the NCAA’s selection process this year. From what he describes of the KPI (Kevin Pauga Index) rating system, I am a fan of it—since it seems to have a more nuanced way to weight wins and losses—compared to RPI, but ultimately it sounds like minor changes: “I looked at eight examples of teams that in 2023 fell just on either side of the bubble for the tournament or hosting. In most cases, literally nothing changed in aggregate.”

• MLB Breakout Prospects To Watch For Every Team — In our annual Prospect Handbook, we identify potential breakout players for each organization. Players ranked outside of the top 10 are eligible for this status. I write the Braves handbook chapter each year and this year my breakout picks include RHP Jhancarlos Lara, OF Luis Guanip and RHP Garrett Baumann. For the 2023 book my picks were RHP Spencer Schwellenbach, 3B Igncaio Alvarez and SS Ambioris Tavarez. Given the current rankings of those three players I think I hit on the first two and missed on the last.

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1. I firmly believe the MLB.com internship was one of the best sports writing internships in the country. I was tremendously lucky to do this internship not just once, but twice with great writers like Mark Bowman and AJ Cassavell teaching me their craft. This was an internship where from day one you acted as a beat writer: I watched games, went to the locker room, talked to players and wrote stories daily. Three writers at Baseball America right now are products of this internship and I know a number of other writers in the industry who came out of this internship program as well. It’s a shame it no longer exists.