Sadly, NBN1 mistyped his question. The question should be who is the Bravessecond most valuable player. The answer to that is difficult, and would cause great debate among the message boards.
The answer to the MVP is simple. Knowing that pitchers have their own award, and we're excluding them, this is the real question: Who is the NL (and possible MLB) Player of the month? Who is hitting .421 for the season (which leads MLB)?
Aside from perhaps the Phillies' Chase Utley, there isn't much of a debate right now for NL MVP. If the award was given out now, I think a guy who batted (way) over .400 and still is a gold glove caliber fielder, would win the award. But, being that I am biased, and we can't exclude pitchers, Brandon Webb deserves to be mentioned at 7-0. In terms of stand out players in April, it's a short list.
overall mvp i would say u can make a pretty good argument for utley at this point. more homers and is batting in the .360's plus his team is in first.
but if chipper bats above .400 for the year, which i doubt will happen, you would have to give it to him regardless of anyones other stats. chipper will hit .340 on the season i bet. hitting .400 is too hard.
i am gonna go off the wall and say Jair Jurrjens.....he has solidified the rotation by himself by being an out of nowhere stud #2 (now that smoltzy is on the DL). he has pitched at least 6 innings in every start which helps tremendously when your bullpen is not up to par....not to mention his ERA is 3.05
sorry i was wrong....he went 5.1 in his first outing but has gone 7, 6, 7, 6, 7 since then
he has only given up 4 runs on 7 hits in his last 3 games (20 innings)
he is on fire right now and we really needed someone to step up since hampton is not coming back and glavine and smoltz have both had a stint on the DL
Yunel Escobar has been everything expected and then some. He has been fantastic.
All that being said, what Chipper Jones has done thus far this season is nothing short of incredible. I know the masses would say Chase Utley is the leading candidate for MVP right now, but I'm not so sure i agree.
Chipper is truly in a league of his own this year!!
I have to agree with saintsfan39759 on this one. With all of the injuries that the Braves' pitching staff has seen this year (John Smoltz twice, Mike Hampton, Peter Moylan, Rafael Soriano and on), the performance that Jair Jurrjens displayed in the first month has been critical.
Chipper has been the backbone of this team. The contributions from Jair and Escobar have been huge. The way Jair stepped up into the rotation and has performed has been a sigh of relief for the Braves. Escobar making the decision of letting Renteria go look beautiful. With all that being said though Chipper has played his heart out and actually looks alot like he did at the end of the 90's and early 00's
And in other new Chipper Jones in in a blowout with 96% of the votes at last check. If Chipper keeps doing as well as he is (his batting average can drop to around .330 and still have a shot) we're looking at the MVP! Go Chipper and Braves!
