ESPN – Braves vs. Nationals – Box Score – August 31, 2008
This team is beneath contempt.
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ESPN – Braves vs. Nationals – Box Score – August 31, 2008
This team is beneath contempt.
Use code “Journal” for a 5% discount.
Keeping with the Jeffy thing, here is the August 30, 2008 Family Circus strip:
http://i34.tinypic.com/xanzg9.jpg
Can’t blame you, Mac. At least Bama beat the tar out of Clemson, right?
If you had told me in March that we would be throwing Elmer Dessens in a one-run ballgame on the last day of August…I would have had a much more productive summer.
Hell of a recap.
Ill tell you what, i usually find comic relief in some losses, since the “end” when i recognized it months ago, and especially since the Tex trade, I dont get myeslf worked up, Elmer Dessens infuriates me!
Why not let a young kid like stockman or ridgeway at least get a shot to blow it, but elmer dessnes?!
4–agreed.
The pissy part isn’t so much losing but how. If Cox was willing to use Ohman they why wait until Dessens had blown the lead? Granted Ohman didn’t pitch that well once he came in but if he’s available he (or maybe Bennett or Tavarez) should have gotten the ball in the 8th. But not Elmer $%# Dessens!
Apparently, the plan is now to lose as many games as poosible. Swept by the mighty Washington Nationals!
Wow, guys. I went to a Sunday afternoon Rays game against Baltimore, had to sit in the nosebleed section for the entire game for the first time ever, and it was the craziest I’d ever seen the Trop. There was more energy in that place with them playing the freakin’ Orioles than when I went last year to a Red Sox game at the Ted. Like 20 of us went from our baseball team, and man, that’s becoming a good place to watch a ballgame. Except for when we all tried to sit behind the 3rd base dugout (yeah, that was going to work…) and the mean man told us to leave and that he didn’t wanna see us again.
I am actually most irritated keeping has-beens and never-will-bes on opur roster and only calling up James Parr for September. Isn’t it more valuable to know what Canizares or Diory Hernandez can do than to watch Corky Miller flail away futilely? It’s like this team has no idea how to use September in a lost season.
BTW, Pujols 2-for-4 and hitting .364.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3562731
Looks like the D-Backs are going to have a little Sparkplug in their lineup for the playoffs. 😛
“Say Hello to my Little friend”…and we all know how that worked out…
I knew Corky would be back–remember if he can come back in September he can certainly be part of our roster in 2009….
Maybe Corky promised Bobby that this would be his last year if Bobby brought him up for a last hurrah in September. We can hope anyway.
Mark Bradley says the Braves organization is in shambles and the team will be down for years. Agree?
http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/bradley/entries/2008/08/31/restoring_braves_luster_will_t.html
I don’t mind having some arms such as Dessens and Tavarez on the team — some of the young guys like Jurrjens and Morton probably need to be shut down.
But I too would like to see some prospects other than just James Parr.
I hadn’t realized that about Morton, but you may be right. He pitched 79 innings in the minors and has pitched 69 1/3 in the majors, after a grand total of 79 2/3 in 2007, 100 in 2006, and 124 2/3 in 2005. He’s never pitched anything close to this many. JJ is 2 years younger, so his arm needs protecting even more — Morton’s lack of heavy mileage in the minors may end up being a good thing — but they both should be on extraordinarily short leashes.
I see where Nunez was mad at Elijah Dukes for pounding his chest after the game-winning walk yesterday. Dude, if you had made your pitches, he wouldn’t have been celebrating a game-winning walk.
#12,
It’s only what I’ve been saying for 1.5-2 years. This organization is in SHAMBLES. There almost isn’t an organization.
We literally have NO position player prospects that are ready to be MLB players.
Schaefer would hit .200 in a ML uniform right now and Freeman and what’s his name simply aren’t ready.
Our current lineup is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.
PLEASE do not try to bring back Glavine. He is DONE. It’s over with John, too. Just stink again next year and start slowly rebuilding piece by piece. The fans don’t come anymore anyway so put a young hustling energetic team on the field and the fans will have to like it.
We haven’t done much right this year, but this some five star tanking. Swept by the Nats with Elmer Dessens on the mound. The NBA just called and said this is embarrassing to the integrity of the game.
Good to see you haven’t lost your gift for overstatement Chief. You are the equivalent of the crazy guy on the corner wearing a box that has “The End is Near” written on it in crayon.
Marc Schneider–Of course I agree: it has been obvious all summer. Time is too short to repeat all of the stupid moves made by the Braves (with the first Teixeria trade being the crowning glory), but over the last four years we have seen a gradual decline, culminating in a certain collapse. Since 1985 the Braves went from having aging players and a good collection promising minor leaguers to now having broken down players and promising minor league players who are a couple of years away.
Sure, there is lots of talent on the farm (particularly between Rome and Myrtle Beach), but I fear that the Braves front office will convince themselves that they are a player or two away (just as they convinced themselves that Frenchy only needed 3 days at Mississippi) and trade key prospects for mediocre players, leaving the team pretty much as it is.
So, yes, I think Braves fans had better steel themselves for a few years like we had in the late 1970s and late 1980s. It may now come to that, but I think there is a real chance that it will take years before the team is as competitive as most of us would like.
Obviously, I hope that I am wrong….
AAR — not to mention that Morton pitched in the AFL last offseason.
AJC headline:
“No teams express interest in Hampton”
Really?!? No way!
I agree with the sentiment of Bradley’s article, though what scares me far worse than enduring some terrible seasons is settling for an indefinite number of mediocre ones. The worst possible thing for this franchise would be to convince itself that it can compete next season. Seriously, with the (inevitable) collapse of the rotation–which is hardly surprising, considering workloads and history, but also foreboding–how can anyone think the Braves are ‘pieces’ away? The pitching staff alone needs three starters and a couple durable middle relievers even to be competitive. And then there’s the outfield…
Stephen, we will know how Wren views this team by his deals this winter. I don’t think he is so stupid to believe this awful team is a player or two away from competitive. He is smart enough to realize the Braves will not win this season by trading away Tex. I will not give judgement on Wren until I see how he approaches this winter.
Robert–Sure the Chief has exaggerated, but on the other hand, he has largely been proven right this season.
KC–One of the things which I will say in Wren’s favor is that he has not fallen into the trap of rushing players to the majors. I like the fact that he tried to give Morton time at AAA and seems to be doing the same with Hanson and Schafer.
That said, I think the Braves followed the Teixeria (and Mahay) blunder by a bigger one in the winter: once it became clear that they could not re-sign Tex, then they had two choices: trade him when his value was high OR assume that Tex would be with the Braves in 2008 only and do everything to win this season. Instead, they did neither: signing Tom Glavine and trading for Kotsay (even though he played well) were moves which at best half-hearted. By trading for Tex and then failing to make the most of the trade, we wound up with the worst of both worlds–lost prospects (who at a minimum given us some great chips to trade), a lost season and a mediocre 1B….
I really hope that Wren does make some intelligent moves this winter….
Well, on the other hand, both of his moves are short-term in nature…Wren was going for it this year, but he completely ignored the injury factor…the regression of Jeffrey and KJ plus Diaz disappearing entirely didn’t help either. Once Kotsay got hurt, the offense was down to only Yunel, Chipper, Tex, and McCann. Can’t score runs with only four major league players…
If that is correct, it is sad–a GM cannot ignore injuries. Was it a surprise that Kotsay, Chipper, Smoltz, Hampton, Soriano an James all had injury problems?
Wren went to the Winter meetings and spoke about getting a backup catcher (which now appears to have been too ambitious) instead of doing more to improve the team.
The Frenchy situation may not be attributable to Wren–but someone or group of people have convinced themselves that he was the chosen one–against all evidence to the contrary. To be fair, I thought he would be a productive player and I got it wrong. However, between the 3 day stint in the minors and the deep reluctance to move him down the batting order, the Braves have taken forever to recognize the gravity of the problem. It may not be Wren, but the way Frenchy has been handled is an organzational problem….
The Tex trade was not a blunder. The Braves were legitimate contenders at the deadline last year, but they fell apart in August and early September. If Smoltz, Glavine, Moylan, Soriano, and Hudson hadn’t been injured, Tex could have paid off this year too. The Braves would then have made a trade for a bat at this year’s deadline and would have had an excellent chance of winning the East. Meanwhile the players we traded haven’t done crap for Texas yet.
Guess again–Feliz has become among the top pitching prospects in all of baseball…Andrus is still very well regarded as a SS prospect.
More important, even if they never play a game in the majors, they currently have significant value as trading chips.
We traded some of our best assets without significantly improving our team in 2007; while the current situation has to do with a whole host of factors, the fact that we gave up a lot and have little left suggests that the enterprise may not have been that farsighted.
It might not have made any difference–but if we had traded key prospects for starting pitching (which was the key weakness of the 2007 team) then we might have stayed competitive and not faced the need to completely rebuild the rotation.
JS said at the deadline that he originally went after pitching and not Teixeira. I think after being unsuccessful, he just took what he could get to help his team by getting Tex. So I don’t think he could have dealt the prospects for pitching unless he wanted to get fleeced.
Good thing that we didn’t get fleeced….
Chief:
I guess I am one of the few who believes the same things you do. I could just keep telling myself the lie over and over again until it becomes true, but try as I might, there is no way I can get myself to believe that this team will be any good for the next few years unless something drastic takes place. I remember the team barely pulling out the division title in 2005, then losing to the Astros in that awful 18-inning affair and thinking to myself, “Looks like this might be the end of an era.” Back then, something just didn’t feel right about the team, and now the last three years have shown this to be more than true.
One weird thing that I’ve noticed about this season is we’ve give a couple of guys a chance to win the World Series, Tex and Kotsay. It’s almost like saying, “Sorry we brought you into this shitty organization for what little time you were here. Can we make it up to you by trading you to an immediate contender where you will have an immediate impact?”