This isn't your grandfather's Chris Johnson

Before the start of the season, the national media had one question on it's mind with respect to the Braves: who replaces Chipper?  The answer to that question is obvious: nobody.  Chipper Jones will go into the Hall of Fame and be remembered as one of the greatest 3B to ever play the game.

Martin Prado was the assumed heir-apparent, but once he got traded, things started to look bleak.  Frank Wren's remedy for this was to have Kevin Towers throw in Chris Johnson as apart of the Justin Upton trade.  At the start of the season, Wren was hailed as a titan of industry thanks to Johnson's performance.  What's been going on with him lately?

In April, Johnson posted a ridiculous .391 OBP and an OPS of .915.  This was due in large part to a .460 BABIP, an outlier relative to his career number of .354, which seems surprisingly high considering he's really not that fast.  During this time, Johnson was platooning at third with Francisco, so he was facing LHP almost exclusively.  However, for his career, he actually hits RHP better than LHP anyway, so there's no reason to think his performance was due to the platoon.  He was hitting more line-drives than his career average (~26% v. ~24%) and fewer groundballs (~44% v. ~47%), contributing to the high average on batted balls.

May paints a similar picture, but it is during this month that we begin to see more strikeouts, walks, and less power.  He has never been one to take a lot of walks, unfortunate for him considering how often he strikes out.  Johnson was still riding the wave of his high BABIP during this time (though it has begun to regress), and his batted ball data wasn't appreciably different from his April numbers, leading one to believe that while the numbers are still inflated to some extent, the true talent-level performance may be within sight.  It should be noted that the month of May saw the height of the platoon between Johnson/Francisco despite Fredi Gonzalez's assertion that Johnson would be the everyday guy.

The Ides of June are upon us, and with the trade of Francisco, Johnson has more or less become the regular 3B.  Unfortunately, that hasn't been the best news, as June hasn't been kind to him.  His BB:K ratio is trending in the right direction, and he has regained some of his power despite not hitting a HR thus far in June.  His BABIP has dropped from ~.400 the first two months of the season to .280, well below his career average, and while nobody wants to see that necessarily, one can take solace in the idea that the number will almost certainly rise.

The most troubling aspects of Johnson's recent struggles have been the inordinate amount of groundballs he hits, and because GB% typically has an inverse relationship with LD% and FB%, he has turned into a double-play waiting to happen.  Again, these percentages are taken from a sample of two weeks' worth of data, so it's too early to begin tweeting Chipper and asking him to ride into Turner Field Braveheart-style to lead this team in October

If there's a silver lining to be found, it's that Fredi has proven himself to be flexible and proactive about Johnson's struggles, recently hitting in the seventh and eighth spot in the lineup.  Now if only he would do the same with Andrelton Simmons (sigh). 

Is Chris Johnson an ideal replacement for Chipper?  If the question is asked in a vacuum, the answer is an obvious no.  Once the circumstances are taken into account (lack of financial flexibility of the team, lack of an available upgrade on the trade market or internally), his offensive performance has been about as good as one could ask for.  He's not a long-run solution, he's not an All-Star, and his defense isn't spectacular (though he hasn't been as bad as the author predicted him to be), but if a team can afford to bat him near the bottom of their lineup, that's a good indicator of the talent level in said lineup.  When considering all the variables, the leading returns point toward Johnson being a very good pickup for Frank Wren and the Braves.