The Cleveland Indians and outfielder Michael Brantley agreed to a four-year $25 Million extension this past offseason, with a club option for $11 Million in 2018. The move made few headlines in the national media amid the dozens of other multimillion dollar extensions, but it is one that could pay large dividends for the Indians.
To call 2013 a break out year for Michael Brantley would be a bit of a stretch. The 10 home runs, 17 stolen bases, and .728 OPS over 600 plate appearances aren’t anything particularly special to write about. They’re certainly not the type of numbers that would have teams lining up to ink Brantley to an extension. But there were signs that Brantley could produce more in the future.
He slashed .345/.364/.464 in September and had similarly impressive months in May and June. At age 26, he was inconsistent in the box. For $6 Million a year, the Indians rolled the dice that Brantley could turn into a consistent producer with very little downside. Inconsistency in the Big Leagues has a tendency to turn into consistent good production, or consistent bad production as the league adjusts and develops a standard scouting report. I suppose a player could remain inconsistent (Josh Beckett, AJ Burnett, and Josh Hamilton come to mind), but that doesn’t support my premise. Brantley has taken the good road – consistent good production.
He’s currently 12th in wOBA (one spot ahead of Miguel Cabrera), 13th in fWAR (better than Miguel Cabrera, and Nelson Cruz), and 10th in WRC+ (tied with Victor Martinez) in the Majors. He’s not just turning in one of those advanced metric darling seasons where he draws a bunch of walks and hustles to some doubles. He already has more home runs than he did a year ago and if you care about RBIs, he’s got more than Troy Tulowitski.
We’re about 45% of the way through the Major League schedule and Michael Brantley is a top 10 position player in the AL.
Almost as important as all of the production that Brantley has provided to this point is that we can finally start to call him Dr. Smooth. Baseball-Reference lists players nicknames and never before have I been so surprised that a player had a nickname. Not only does Michael Brantley have a nickname, it’s Dr. Smooth. How cool is that?!
An important tenant to sports nicknames is that the player must earn the nickname before it fills common sports lexicon. Sometimes it is easy: Carlos Gonzalez becomes CarGo with a simple shortening of the name. Other times, it takes a decade of consistent dominant performance for people to call you The Machine. With Dr. Smooth, a few sportswriters came up with it on Twitter. Given Brantley’s relatively small presence in the national baseball community, it has taken a while to catch on.
There are Dr. Smooth shirts floating around and Justin Masterson had one on in the clubhouse the other day. Masterson was “showing my support for the man, the myth, the legend.” It’s about time we all start to recognize Dr. Smooth.
-Sean Morash
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