Chipper Jones

Chipper Jones is out for the year with a torn ACL, but let’s hope this isn’t it for the man who has played his entire major league career for manager Bobby Cox.  Chipper has made it known since last season that retirement could be around the corner, but like Baseball Tonight’s Eduardo Perez, I don’t see Chipper calling it quits now that his season has ended unexpectedly.  He wants to go out on his own terms, and these aren’t them.  At 38, his career is nearing the end, but I find it hard to believe that he will be able to say good-bye after watching from the bench as his team battles for the National League crown.

Continue reading "Will Chipper hang 'em up?"

hree-run home run in his very first major league at-bat.  Batting seventh in the lineup behind Chipper Jones, Brian McCann, and others has limited the pressure on the 14th overall pick in the 2007 draft, but before long, you can expect to see Heyward taking his hacks in the cleanup spot.

Continue reading "Jason Heyward: Instant Hit"

eek, and I thought it went quite well.  My team’s top hitters are Joe Mauer, Derrek Lee, Chipper Jones, and Ichiro Suzuki, and the pitching staff includes Josh Johnson, Chad Billings

Continue reading "The most promising time of the year"

Chase Utley, Texas’s blue-collar puma Lance Berkman, and the South’s true Southern man, Chipper Jones. While Jones approaches the .400 barrier set by Ted Williams in 1941, Utley chases Davey Johnson’s second baseman single season home run record and Lance Berkman pursues his elusive first MVP award. They’re the faces of the National League and will anchor the league’s attempt to end the rut that has driven the American League supremacy that is often over dwelled on numerous baseball analysis outlets.

Continue reading "National League Looks to End Rut"

Troy Tulowitzki.

Chipper Jones 3B – Atlanta Braves

The now ageless Chipper Jones is trying to accomplish something that is more elusive than Big Brown’s Triple Crown, or Alex Rodriguez’s World Series ring. He is trying to become the first player since Ted Williams in 1941, to hit .400. Many have tried, but all have failed in the 67 years since the milestone was last reached. As of July 5th, the severely slumping

Continue reading "Mic's National League All-Star Team"

And probably not your own Braves, either. I watched them boot the ball around last night with a long-time Braves fan; three first-inning errors led to three runs, and they never recovered, losing 4-3, in a game without Chipper and a host of others.

Continue reading "Not Your Daddy's Braves"

Imagine having a pitcher who could not only confound switch-hitting studs like Lance Berkman and Chipper Jones, but could easily throw a complete game with the same arm-fatigue associated with half that many innings.

Continue reading "Two Kooky Pitchers"

And it should tell us something about this year's Triple Crown contenders. Chipper Jones has a shot because of his .400-plus batting average (currently at .420), but his 15 HRs and 41 RBIs are trailing the leaders in those categories (21 HRs by Utley and 56 RBIs by Utley and Adrian Gonzalez). That average is going to be hard to reach, but Chipper's tendency towards injuries large and small mean he will likely continue to trail in the counting stats.

Continue reading "Triple Crowns"

sibly career-) ending injury, and not long after Pedro reached that same level.

Then, last night, Chipper Jones hit homer number 400, becoming the only switch hitter to reach that level while maintaining a career .300 average. This in a year where he's currently hitting .418, one of only 14 players since 1980 to be above .400 in June, guys with names like Boggs, Carew, Walker and Gwynn. One can only wonder how many more homers Chipper might have hit, if he hadn't fallen to injury so often in recent times--he hasn't played more than 150 games since 2003, and has only cracked 130 games twice since then. He's got a few more years in the majors, so we may see him hit 500, and perhaps pass Eddie Murray (504) or the Mick (536) in the switch-hitting home run department.

Continue reading "Another Milestone Passed"