Atlanta Braves vs. St. Louis Cardinals – Box Score – April 28, 2010 – ESPN.
What a terrible ballclub. Terrible pitching, terrible defense (which at least gives the terrible pitchers some excuse) and offense that would need steroids to reach terrible status. The Cardinals got two in the first and essentially were never threatened after that point. Braves pitchers walked nine men and struck out five. Braves hitters combined for seven hits, two by Melky, who suddenly looks like the team’s best player. I have nothing else for you. Go in peace.
Break up the Braves. Keep Mac, Jason, JJ and Hanson. I can’t care less for the others.
Break up the Hawks. They have some serious attitude/behavior problem.
i’m depressed…
I repeat: Does Mike Bibby’s death remove him from the cap?
This is bad. I like it better when they string me along for awhile first.
The one good thing this team has is a bullpen…which is pretty useless when there are no leads to protect (the first 2 games of this series notwithstanding).
@2 I am very very depressed. Bobby is trying to make history in his final season in a very wrong way.
This sucks. And the Rays are on fire. My allegiance is being tested.
Cardinals 6, Catatoniots 0
When is Chipper going to retire? that is the question. I don’t think he makes it the whole year without 1 or 2 stints on the 15 Day DL. And when is mr. suck Matt Diaz going to go back on the bench. Man this team stinks
I feel your pain…This team was so exciting for the first week or so what a huge turn around I feel like a Cub fan waiting once a decade to have hope of reaching the playoffs. Not for nothing the Mets are playing great and I live in NY baseball couldn’t suck more right now!
@8 You can take a year off as a Braves fan. Nobody will blame you.
@9 Matty has never been a fast starter. It’s just too bad that we don’t have enough fast starter to compensate. Once Jason cools down, our offense has nothing.
Will we ever win another game?
well we do get to face houston on friday, which really means nothing
Maybe we can sign Javy back cheap in the next offseason. Let’s try to trade Lowe again now!
Not taht KK has pitched great, but it’s ridiculous that he never has any runs to work with.
G-Braves got no-hit by Chris Tillman. Fantastic!
trade anyone not named Prado, Yunel, Heyward, McCann, Jurrjens, Hanson, Medlen and I still like Huddy. Rest should become trade bait or should retire. Sorry Chipper
Meanwhile, in the Highlight Factory, the Hawks spit away a nine-point lead with less than four minutes left. Goes without saying that, on a must-score possession, Josh Smith shot a three. In other words, been nice knowing ya, Mike Woodson.
Joe Johnson too. I’m sure Knicks fans will take kindly to the Caspar Milquetoast routine.
Frankly, I’d be just as happy if nobody but Smith, Horford, and Crawford were back next year, and Smith had to play with an electric shock collar for when he does stupid s*** like that.
My wife asked me tonight why I’ve seen so depressed the last couple of days. I said, “The Braves are about to lose their eighth straight game.” She nodded and said she understood. We’ve been married almost 29 years, she started understanding about ’87 or ’88.
God, We suck!
19,
Teague, too. He’s the only other player on that team I care about if they’re resigned to letting Joe Johnson walk.
Without Johnson down the stretch, Crawford was the only real half-court option. But it never should’ve come to that.
Tough night for ATL sports.
@21 Teague will suck as long as Woodson is still with the team.
@19 I agree Mac. The same group of players will go nowhere. Something needs to be changed.
Maybe the Braves are doing me a favor. My baby girl is coming out next week and I wouldn’t have time to watch any games anyway.
Free Freddie Freeman.
.232/.267/.451 with 4 2B, 1 3B, and 4HR.
Right now, for us, those are gaudy numbers. He’s Albert F’ing Pujols compared the the zombies we’re trotting out every night.
I’m joking of course, but think about it;
could he really be worse than Glaus or McClouth?
The Braves are really achieving things: I wonder if any other organization in baseball history has had its big league and AAA clubs no-hit in the same season.
Rome did not get with the program: they were shutout, but frustrated the night by gettting three hits…..
#25
yes. he could. you do know it’s not even MAY yet, correct?
if it’s June 1 and we still suck this badly, I say trade everyone/anyone under 30.
kc, early congrats – hope all goes well and you get a healthy baby girl
Shut out 5 times in 21 games (including that no-hitter). Not good.
lol we’re 3.5 back of the nationals
Maybe it’s a Hot Tub Time Machine thing? I just listened on the radio. Could someone check the uniforms? Is it the 80s again?
I’m feeling the frustration of childhood fandom returning. It must be.
We did this to ourselves when we had Rick Mahler day.
When you score 13 runs in 8 games, I don’t care who is on the mound, you cannot expect to win. We can come back and trash Lowe, Kawakami, and Bobby later. Until these assies start hitting, this pitching staff is a moot point.
KC–Congratulations and best of luck with the birth process! I hope all goes well.
From DOB:
Forget the tourniquet, the Braves need a debrilator to resuscitate an offense that’s produced 13 runs in an eight-game skid, the longest losing streak for the Braves since a 10-gamer in June 2006.
They’ve been shut out three times in the eight games and failed to hit a home run in 10 of their past 11 games, including no long balls during the losing streak.
The Braves have never had a worse start under manager Bobby Cox, who said Wednesday afternoon, “It’s hard to say we’re playing real good baseball, but we are.”
That quote is completely bogus and infuriating. If you really feel like this team is playing good baseball, you’re not watching.
My baby girl is coming out next week and I wouldn’t have time to watch any games anyway.
You are getting off easy. The dirty diapers and sleepless nights are nothing compared to having to watch this shit every night.
The defense gave away two runs tonight before I had even taken my shoes off.
It would be infuriating if it weren’t for a few things…one being that Bobby has been saying stuff like that for twenty years and we ought to be used to it. Second, he’s not really that wrong. It’s not like we’ve been losing all these games by 10 runs.
@35 – I remember that 10 game skid well. I think we only won 5 or 6 games that entire month…felt a lot like this.
26 – Third shutout in a row for Rome.
Also, Tillman had a 6.11 ERA coming into the no hitter tonight.
It seems the entire Braves system is bereft of bats. Is it possible our organizational focus has swung a little too far towards pitching?
If you aren’t going to draft any bats, you need to spend some free agent money on them eventually. $2.5M to Troy Glaus is not what I am talking about.
Parish–The Braves have had trouble developing hitters and the problem will persist for the foreseeable future.
The best thing that could be said about last year’s draft was that maybe the Braves’scouts were better than everybody else and that eventually the less heralded players would develop. While it is still too early tell, Mycal Jones is now looking like the first real BUST from last year’s draft class….
This is getting old. I would love a 2 game winning streak to give me a little hope.
Oh, The Humanity!!!! We blow….We 1985ish blow, we blow so hard that we make Katrina look like a breezy rain shower.
I’m going on the hypothesis that KK got sick of no run support so he was trying out the Lowe method of giving up a bunch of runs so we’d hit some for him… obviously that didn’t work.
I think the fundamental problem as a fan right now is that these are not bad ballplayers… these are (mostly) good ballplayers who are playing very badly. This is even more frustrating than when everybody was injured… and probably more frustrating than if we just hadn’t put together a decent team… but what Wren gave us SHOULD be able to win games. We shouldn’t have so many guys trying to get UP to the Mendoza line. We knew we weren’t sending out a Yankees line-up, but they should at least be passable. Even Martin “Hot hand” Prado has dropped his BA 65 points in the last 10 games.
Almost a whole season to make up under five games. I’m not worried yet. Really, unless you’re an Orioles fan, it’s far to early to lose hope in anything. How on earth are they already twelve games back?
If I knew any Orioles fans, I’d feel bad for them, but all of my Orioles friends became Nationals friends as soon as the Expos moved to DC. (Maybe the Baltimore Orioles should become the Brooklyn Pigeons. Just sayin’.)
I just re read jjschiller’s post from a couple of threads ago to try to gain some positive vibe. It’s not working.
I hear ya Randy. If I am mopey my wife asks me if I’ve been ‘watching’ the Braves again.
Congratulations kc. @37 LOL.
Still can’t believe this team let Kelly Johnson go for absolutely nothing. Wouldn’t a two million gamble on him for 2010, even to be the left fielder instead of frickin’ Melky, have been a smart move? Wren spent nearly that much (1.75 million base) for the decaying corpse of Troy Glaus.
I wonder if Cox wishes he could just retire now and not wait out the season.
Letting KJ go was the one move I hated. KJ was frustrating as hell at times, but seemed so close and with so much potential.
46
Well we couldn’t have had Kelly for 1.5, as he was arb eligible, I think it would have been more like $4 million or at least $3 if memory serves.
But yeah, would be nice to have him (although who’s to say he wouldn’t have been dragged down by this team).
The 2010 Atlanta Braves “Hey, at least were not Baltimore!”
Also, I know I’m dreaming, but with Coletti not happy with Matt Kemp’s baserunning and defense, any chance we make a good trade partner? Dodgers need pitching badly and that’s the one thing we have.
I think if we had kept KJ, he wouldn’t have bounced back anyway. He’d be berated for “keeping the bat on his shoulders” so much that he wouldn’t know what to do.
Let him have his 13 BB : 15 K and his 8 HR somewhere else.
The truly depressing thing is, the Braves’ solution to our offensive woes is to tamper with our plate discipline, which is one of the few things going well for the team. It’s like they’re telling hitters to start pressing. The offense is rudderless. God help us if McDowell starts giving pitchers bad advice for the long term too.
@46/47: had KJ stayed, he would have had similar stats as Heyward, I am sure. I know it’s not that simple but anyway: WTF is TP doing?!?
Last week, I went to my usual Wednesday night pickup game after church. The thinking being, ah I don’t want to see the braves lose to Holliday after such a great win the night before. It was kind of my way of extending the good vibe.
Well, little did I know, when I played last night, the Braves had not won since. There are no good vibes left, only sadness and dispair.
Bobby Cox: “It’s hard to say we’re playing real good baseball, but we are.”
How did those U.S. gunners at Pearl Harbor do, Bobby?
The elephant in the room, I think, is Chipper. You can complain all you want about Glaus or Melky or whomever, but the fact is, we have a declining superstar in the middle of the order who can’t stay healthy and can’t really play even when he is. About the only thing he can do now is criticize other players.
By the way, does anyone know the longest losing streak for a team that eventually made the playoffs? I’m willing to bet that teams that lose 8 (9, 10, 11, 15?) don’t often make the playoffs.
A baseball season is a long one, and teams that look helpless in April and May turn into contenders in August. BUT, they look helpless by dropping series 2 out of 3, while failing to win more than back to back games. That’s not what the Braves have done so far, so I don’t see much hope as this team is presently built.
Something major needs to happen to shake things up – a trade, firing the coaching staff, asteroid strike, anything really. Unfortunately, Bobby’s style for the last 20 years has not been to push the panic button. And, in my opinion, he ought to be whacking the panic button with a sledgehammer. I expect Cox to keep fiddling while Atlanta burns.
@55,
I like the asteroid strike idea, but Derek Lowe would probably be the only one to survive.
Looked for stats on loosing streaks and playoffs, cant find anything to back up that thought, anyone know where to look?
54
The Cards team that won the World Series in 2006 had 2 eight game losing streaks (h/t Talking Chop).
@54,
Thanks, Dusty, that makes sense considering that the Cards barely finished over .500 and backed into the playoffs in a weak division (even though they eventually won the WS obviously due to LaRussa’s genius). It’s going to be a lot harder to do that in the NL East.
“There are no good vibes left, only sadness and dispair.”
That should be the BravesJournal tagline.
“Parish–The Braves have had trouble developing hitters and the problem will persist for the foreseeable future.”
I do not know whether it is developmental or drafting, but our minors are devoid of hitting prospects who are performing right now. I think Freeman will ultimately become a good MLB hitter, but is there anyone else down there? Cody Johnson has great power, and I was excited by his increase in walk rate last year, but have you seen how bad his K’s have become in AA? No one makes it in MLB with that kind of K rate in the minors; no one. So that wipes out AAA and AA; we are down to high A to see if anyone can hit. Despite having all of the young arms, have you seen our record in the minors? we are 32-49 (which conveniently pro-rates out in a 162 game season to 64-102). That is really, really bad.
Thanks Dusty, I was going batty trying to find it. bfan, how bad is his K rate? I can think of alot of free swingers who make it to the bigs, if they can hit for power, walk a little bit, and play acceptable defense, especially if its a position that doesnt usually offer those power numbers, or if you could hide him in a lineup (not this one for sure)
this is a really painful team to watch.
I can hardly stand it.
I actually stopped watching last night in the 4th and watched the Hawks. I’m considering going out to Citi Field some night. That’s how much it hurts: I may give money to the Mets.
Hurts to say, but Larry Wayne looks nearly done. Not “stick a fork in him” done, but done as a serious threat. Hopefully he’ll prove me wrong.
He looks like he didn’t work out as hard this winter, softer, maybe to put less wear & tear on.
Maybe we’ll go all ’08 Rockies and wreck shop from mid-May on. I hope so.
39,
If he were qualified, he’d have probably made BA’s top 10 overall. In baseball. Don’t let the ERA deceive you, he’s extremely good.