Will Markakis finally get that all-star invite?
For 13 years, Braves fielder has been piling up hits and producing Gold Glove-calibre defence
ATLANTA — For a dozen years, Nick Markakis has been baseball’s metronome, good for four professional at-bats each night, for 155-plus games each year. Every April — the first nine of them in Baltimore, the last three in Atlanta — you could pencil him in for 700 plate appearances, 175 hits and Gold Glove-calibre defence in right field, and invariably, by the end of September, that’s what he had given you.
But this season, Markakis’s 13th, someone has cranked up the metronome into EDM raveparty territory. At age 34, he is having perhaps his finest season, leading the National League in hits entering Friday, with 74, and hitting (. 333) and slugging (. 505) at career-best clips. And he is a major reason the Atlanta Braves are surprise contenders in the National League East, battling the Washington Nationals this weekend for the division lead.
“My God, the guy’s a machine,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said of his everyday right fielder and cleanup hitter. “It doesn’t matter (who he’s facing) — righty, lefty. He’s hitting everybody. He’s one of the steadiest players I’ve ever been around. He’s one of those guys — you have to manage him to appreciate him. You have to see him every day.”
Markakis’ performance this season has ushered in a new level of appreciation for him around the game, with people all of a sudden taking note of the 2,100plus hits he has amassed in his career, doing some quick math, and realizing it isn’t out of the question for him to reach 3,000 — which, for decades, has almost uniformly earned a player a spot in Cooperstown. It would be an amazing thing for a player who, to this point, has never even been an all-star.
That’s right: Markakis has never made an all-star team — a fact that can still catch people off-guard.
“I didn’t even know that until someone brought it up recently,” said Alex Anthopoulos, who took over as the Braves’ general manager in November. “I was shocked. You feel like he’s been a perennial all-star. He’s a complete player.”
It’s possible he is one of those players, much like Washington’s Daniel Murphy, who transform themselves as hitters late in their careers. But Markakis is adamant that he has not become one of those launch-angle devotees, like Murphy, who has altered his swing to lift the ball.
“I’m not a guy who’s going to go up there and alter my swing to start swinging up on the ball,” he said. “I think that would actually give you the lowest success rate, in terms of being on-plane with the ball. My biggest thing is trying to be on time and trying to hit the ball out in front (of the strike zone). If you hit balls out in front, you’re naturally going to have a better launch angle without necessarily changing your swing. If you catch balls deep (in the zone), you’re going to hit hard ground balls and line drives. If you want to elevate the ball, you’re going to have a better chance if you catch it out front, as opposed to deep.”
It may not be a coincidence, however, that Markakis’ career year at the plate has come in his first season under a highly progressive, advanced-analytics front office regime — something he did not have in Baltimore or in his first three years in Atlanta. Anthopoulos, the former Toronto Blue Jays GM, had spent the previous two seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of the most progressive front offices in baseball, and among his first moves with the Braves was to boost the analytics department from two employees to more than a dozen.
If this is the new Markakis — a .330-hitting, .500-slugging onbase machine — everything changes in regards to how his career will be viewed. A free agent after the season, he could find himself a sought-after asset instead of one of those mid-30s veterans who struggles to land a job in a marketplace that values youth above all.