Adam Jones Stepping Up as MVP Candidate When O's Need Him Most

It's too early to get heavily into MVP talk. If you came in here hoping for a full breakdown of the early MVP picture in the American League, too bad. 

We're only going to go so far as to shine light on the guy who's emerging as the man to beat for the AL MVP. He's Baltimore Orioles center fielder Adam Jones, and he's awesome.

Jones has welcomed 2015 by hitting everything in sight. Through 14 games, he's batting a staggering .442 with five home runs, and he's leading the AL in OPS at 1.290 and, according to FanGraphs, WAR at 1.3.

Predictably, the Orioles have enjoyed having the AL's best player on their side. They're not running away with the AL East like they did in last year's 96-win romp, but their 7-7 record at least has them in the mix early on.

Winslow Townson-USA TODAY Sports

Considering how the Orioles were generally viewed coming into the season, that's not bad. "Afterthought" is too strong of a word, but many perceived them as something like that.

And not without good reason. While AL East rivals Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays loaded up over the offseason, the Orioles lost Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis and Andrew Miller to free agency and replaced them with very little.

Instead, the writing on the wall said general manager Dan Duquette was banking on the bullpen not missing Miller, on healthy versions of Manny Machado and Matt Wieters and on an un-suspended Chris Davis filling the void left by Cruz and Markakis. From the outside, this looked like a gamble.

The projection systems mirrored the generally "meh" attitude that people—at least those outside Baltimore, anyway—had about the 2015 Orioles. FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus both projected the Orioles to fall from the top of the AL East all the way to the bottom.

But you know, there's just something about the Orioles and the projections.

As Jon Meoli of The Baltimore Sun noted, the Orioles have developed a habit of beating the projections in the last couple of years. Luck has been part of the reason why, but the projections have also failed to anticipate breakout performances.

Which brings us back to Jones.

Given that the 29-year-old center fielder has hit .284 and averaged 31 home runs and 12 stolen bases over the last three seasons, he's not exactly in the middle of a "breakout." But he's certainly well on his way to being the next Oriole to greatly outperform expectations. And with Wieters still sidelined due to elbow tendinitis and Machado and Davis slumping out of the gate, the Orioles have truly needed Jones' early dominance.

All he has to do now is keep it up. And given that his hot hitting hasn't happened by accident, this may actually be doable.

I certainly wouldn't describe Jones as a tight-lipped player. On the contrary, he's one of the more outgoing personalities in the game today. He's also clearly one of the better sports in the game.

But when Brittany Ghiroli of MLB.com asked him last week to explain his hot hitting, he offered the verbal equivalent of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

"I've never asked the why, just live with the results," Jones said. "I'm not going to say I'm doing this or doing that. Just being aggressive and trying to find good pitches to hit."

If you take his word for it, you'll assume that Jones is just doing his normal thing and getting outrageous results. With things being right in the middle of Small Sample Size Territory, that's a plausible theory.

But instead, let's take the word of a National League scout who spoke to ESPN.com's Jerry Crasnick:

It's easy to toss around a sentiment like that when a player is putting up video game numbers like Jones is. But scouts do tend to know what they're talking about.

And in this case, it turns out that Jones has indeed elevated his game.

There's one area in particular where that's obvious. One of the knocks on Jones throughout his career has been that he doesn't make enough contact to justify his hyper-aggressive approach, as his strikeout rates have tended to be right around league average.

But courtesy of FanGraphs, check out where Jones' strikeout rate was at the start of play Tuesday:

Data courtesy of FanGraphs

That's a gigantic drop, and it's served to put Jones among the league's top contact hitters. And with his walk rate also rising ever so slightly, it does look like he was keeping a secret when he said he's not doing anything differently.

On the surface, it doesn't actually look like Jones is being more selective. Through Tuesday, FanGraphs had his overall swing rate at a very Jones-like 55.2 percent. At 41.3 percent, he's also chasing pitches outside the strike zone at a very Jones-like rate.

There are, however, other ways to be selective.

One way is to give yourself good counts to hit in. Baseball Savant can tell us that few hitters have seen more first pitches outside the strike zone than Jones has, so he deserves credit for doing this with his first-pitch swing percentage:

The benefit of all this? That's that Jones' first-pitch strike percentage has dropped from consistently over 60 percent all the way down to 53.5 percent. He's getting himself in more hitter's counts, and that's something that would indeed lead to more walks and fewer strikeouts.

But oftentimes, being selective early can also allow a hitter to be more selective throughout the rest of an at-bat. That's where we find another apparent change Jones has made.

Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

In the past, a typical Jones at-bat saw him swing at pretty much everything. For a picture of what that looks like from a statistical perspective, here's a map of Jones' 2012 through 2014 swing rates from Brooks Baseball:

Image courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net

Here you see nothing but red inside the strike zone and plenty of warm zones outside the zone. Even if you didn't know who this chart belonged to, you could probably guess Adam Jones just from looking.

But now let's turn to what Jones is doing in 2015:

Image courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net

This image is a bit of a mess, but a couple of things stand out. One is that Jones isn't chasing as many pitches off the outer third of the zone. Another is that he's carrying out an all-out assault on pitches on and just below the inner third of the zone. 

So where Jones was once swinging at everything, now he's taking a lot of swings at pitches he can hit. 

In light of that, we shouldn't be surprised that he's working on a career-best 27.1 line-drive rate or on beastly OPS's on balls to left field and up the middle. His swing is custom-designed to hit the ball hard and to do damage in those directions, and he's finally allowing himself to do these things to the max.

Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

It's beyond unlikely that keeping all this up will allow Jones to join Ted Williams in the .400 club, of course. At some point, he'll have to deal with the baseball gods taking away his luck and pitchers adjusting to his adjustment. You know, baseball's version of the circle of life.

But it's not hyperbole to say that Jones could end up having the best season of his career in 2015. At least at the plate, he looks like a legitimately better hitter. His going on to hit .300 with upward of 35 bombs is a reasonable possibility.

And if it happens, yet another Oriole will have surpassed expectations in a major way in 2015. In the end, that could mean their first MVP since Cal Ripken Jr. in 1991 and, more importantly, their third trip to the postseason in four years.

Perhaps then, the projections will get the gist.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference unless otherwise noted/linked.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.