ESPN.com – MLB – Box Score – Phillies at Braves
Every time I think we’ve reached a low point, someone digs a hole and we get even lower. Yuck.
When the history of the Braves dynasty is written, there is a good chance that the day it died will be December 16, 2004. Not that Juan Cruz, Charles Thomas, or Dan Meyer, any of them, are likely to amount to much, but the commitment to Tim Hudson has backfired and likely doomed the team to mediocrity throughout the remainder of his contract. Our only hope is that he gets hot sometime next year and we can flip him to the Yankees or Dodgers.
Hudson went five, allowing as many runs on nine hits, two homers, and four walks. He did strike out six, but right now he’s just too hittable even though his strikeout rate has been better in recent outings (and for the season is his best since 2003). His ERA will probably hit five in his next outing. He’s useless, he can’t even eat innings, and we’re on the hook for three more seasons of this.
McBride and Paronto, the goats of the first game, pitched okay in the middle innings, but Franklin and Devine combined to allow a couple of more runs to make it extra-ugly.
The Braves’ runs came on homers by LaRoche (in the first, briefly giving them the lead) and McCann, who combined for five of the team’s nine hits. Everybody else sucked, as has been the case most of the time the last two months. If not for McCann and LaRoche… Well, it’s not like it could have been much worse. But it would have been worse.
If college football season hadn’t started, this season would have driven me off of a VERY tall building
I left to go watch the game while I tried to do some work which…. I’m still working on …I’m fixing to get back to doing it
most definitely not the game I wanted to see
school is killing me… teachers are insane!
Oops, make that even lower. Yuck.
Not sure what happened there with my missing post, no worries. My point was one we all know anyway. We suck. Bad. Like really bad. Oh well….
Hudson really sucks right now. The Braves would be lucky to get him back to 2005 form. I just hope that we didn’t miss the chance to trade him in July to a team that was competitive and needed pitching. Even if we had not received much in return, it would addition rather than subtraction. Of course, in July the Braves laboured under the delusion that they were a competitive team….
No comment – just the sound of a tumbleweed rolling by as we plod along to our first sub .500 season since I was in high school.
I think the Braves’ hot July could be come back to haunt us in 2007. When the trade deadline came we had false hope and thought we still had a chance this year. I wonder what the team would look like now if we were totaly out of it in July.
Spot on about Hudson–he’s awful.
Francoeur must be French for bases loaded pop up.
I’m so sick of this crappy pitching. I think we are stuck with Hudson unless the Braves want to eat his contract. Who is going to take a mediocre (or worse) pitcher with a big contract? I wish this was like the NFL where you could just cut him–he should give back money the way he has pitched. I agree with Mac–the trade for Hudson is going to haunt this team for a long time.
And, I’m waiting to see Kyle Davies actually be a major league pitcher. Of course, I’m sure Roger McDowell will be able to turn him around.
#7, yeah I agree. The Braves should have traded Smoltz and Andruw when they could have gotten a lot back for them and held onto Betemit. The team pretty much had only one good week (right after the Allstar game) all season. That 6-21 record in June should have told JS this team was not a serious contender.
I still expect JS could rob some contender desperate for a starting pitcher in a trade for Hudson in the offseason, but I’m not optimistic he will even try to do that. I have a feeling the Braves will just hope this was a flukey bad season for Tim and stick with him. There are going to be a whole lot of question marks on next year’s pitching staff.
?????
Hmmm.
Next year’s rotation:
Smoltz
Hampton
Hudson
James
Ramirez/Davies/Barry/????
I see it as:
Old
Injured
Mediocre
Promising
Grab Bag
If Smoltz’s elbow breaks down, and Hampton and Hudson continue their recent career trends, could the 2007 Braves rival the late 80’s Braves for ineptitude?
I think however, with the offensive power still on next year’s team, we might be stuck in a period of Texas Rangers-ish performance, where we’ll win a number of 11-7 games and lose an even bigger number of 5-3 games.
seat painter, Barry sucks and shouldn’t be mentioned. I would rather have Cormier and Villarreal has 6th and 7th options for starters over Barry. I just hope Davies and Hudson aren’t a part of next years rotation either. We have one of the worst rotations in MLB. Its sad!
Oh btw, Diaz, KJ, and Langy should be starting in LF next year. They all suck. Diaz can hit, Langy can play defense, KJ cant do either. Good Luck JS, see you next spring training. Hopefully w/ a different cast!!!
that should be ……shouldn’t be starting next year!
Davies, who is 0-2 with a 14.40 ERA in three starts he’s made since having his groin surgically repaired in May, began the bottom of the second with his first career home run and carried a 5-0 lead into the third.
5-0 lead and cant make it through the inning. Klye, my friend, you suck! Good thing we got him back for the final stretch.
Forgive me if you think I’m jumping the gun and pointing the blame where it doesn’t belong, but I am wanting to rant about Roger McDowell for a bit. Last year he was the pitching coach for the Las Vegas 51s (AAA Dodger Affiliate) where, coincidentally, Willy Aybar was showcasing that he was ready.
McDowells staff in Las Vegas has a team ERA of 6.21and a team WHIP of 1.71. Also, his staff allowed 196 homers. All three of these numbers were worst among the Pacific Coast league in 2005.
In 2006 McDowell hasn’t really impressed either, turning a Decent staff into a Below Average Staff.
I guess, where I’m going with this is, why did we hire McDowell? His Resume sucks. I realize you can’t blame him for numerous injuries. Also, you can’t say that he is the reason Tim Hudson has declined. Tim Hudson is the reason Tim Hudson has declined.
Perhaps I’m the only one who feels this way, but if he wasn’t a great pitching coach in the minors, why does the Braves front office think he is a great pitching coach in the Majors? I don’t think he deserves all of the blame. But i’d say he deserves some of it. I’m getting a little bit more negative than I had intended to so I’m gonna shut up now.
i’m engaged now. i popped the question to my High School sweetheart Catie McCoy yesterday. we are getting married after the 2007 season.
i’m just letting you know that i will be distracted all next season with this wedding planning so that is why i am going to swing at a lot of pitches i shouldn’t. please bear with me and i assure you that after all this wedding planning and aftermath, my batting average should be up to .275 by 2008.
I agree that McDowell has proven to be less than a whiz, but it’s difficult to know how much blame or credit to ascribe to a pitching (or hitting) coach. But you can say that not one of the ptichers has really improved on his watch.
I think they need to beef up the offense. With all the talk about the great offense, it’s been very inconsistent. They get five runs in the first two innings of Game 1 and then don’t get another hit against mediocre pitching. Having Chipper out doesn’t help but I think they need to focus on offense since they obviously aren’t going to have great pitching.
One other thing–people suggest that Chipper should move to first base so he would be injured less. But, other than his injury at the beginning of the year–which occurred from playing on a wet field–injuries were related to swinging, not fielding. I don’t think that switching to first would necessarily make him less prone to injury.
The Braves aren’t really a bad team, they just aren’t a real good team. It’s likely that they finish above .500 next year and make a run at the WC. If they could improve the bullpen significantly, they could be a pretty good team even with mediocre starting pitching.
true, I think it is also worth mentioning that if we’d had at least an average closer at the beginning of the season, then we’d probably have 10 more wins or so right now. possibly more.
I might still go to a game next week here in DC and heckle LaRoche… in a good way.
@17
But will your ON BASE PERCENTAGE be that high?
Pitching coach. Who cares who the damn pitching coach is? IT DOESN’T MATTER.
Hudson – precipitous decline.
Thomson – injured
Davies -injured
Boyer – injured
Sosa – sucked. And the list goes on and on. When you are starting Jason Shiell, Lance Corimier, Oscar Villareal, and all of the others for crying out loud, the great pitching coach in the sky couldn’t have fixed that mess. With the power of 20/20 hindsight a lot of things had to go right for the Braves to have had a chance this season. Instead too much went wrong. Last season was a remarkable confluence of positive events. In a remarkable display of Napoleonic hubris the Braves (read Schuerholz) thought that it would happen again. I’m believe that Schuerholz is starting to believe his own press clippings. Hopefully this season will wake his ass up and he’ll do some general managing over the fall.
As Leo Mazzone is proving in Baltimore this year, pitching coaches are not as important as having good (healthy) pitchers.