In the Braves first win on a Wednesday, it was the Bills who delivered a gem. With the pitching-rich system the Braves have developed, one wouldn’t predict that Williams Perez would provide one of the most dominant pitching performances of the season, but that€™’s exactly what happened. He gave the bullpen a rest with 8 innings and only one run, keeping the ball down and in the strike zone by giving up only two hits and no walks. He started the day as a member of the Gwinnett squad until Jhoulys Chacin was traded to the Angels, forcing an emergency start. I guess this is one of the good things about the Braves re-shuffling the locations of their affiliates. At any rate, Jhoulys Chacin is gone, and another live arm has been added to the fold.
It was another performance where the Braves out-hit their opponents. Even though we’re historically awful, it’€™s astonishing how many times we’€™ve collected more hits than the other team. Freddie Freeman hit another home run, and he’€™s up to 6 now. No one has more than one. Wow. Markakis, Pierzynski, Beckham, Aybar, and Mallex all had one hit, and Kelly Johnson had two hits. Kelly is starting to turn it on as he’s increased his OPS about 100+ points since the beginning of May.
We don’€™t get these wins very often, so it’€™s nice to see a well-played game. Tomorrow is Aaron Blair vs. Vince Velasquez. Their future vs. our future. Enjoy it, folks.
RE: Bethancourt. I would say it had something to do with the .527 OPS, the 8/60 BB/K ratio, and 14 passed balls in about 50 games…
The guy who was known for his defense sucked at defense.
Max Scherzer decided to regress to his mean.
Great game tonight. Love the Williams pace – he’s ready to pitch as soon as the ball’s back in his glove. Nice night at the ball park. Looking forward to a few dozen more win or lose.
Show of hands for everyone who saw this game coming from Bills. I’m still perplexed by the Chacin trade. On the surface it looks like we gave him away. Couldn’t we have gotten a real prospect for him at the least?
Well, haven’t posted here since 2006 or so, came back for the worst season this side of 1988.
So much has changed as I’ve read around this journal, but i have one question: do we still to game threads here?
i will bodly predict 50 more wins this season.
The Phillies hitters were overmatched and outnumbered tonight. Great pitching, fellas.
We’re not the worst team in the majors now. Minnesota amazingly is (8-25). We’re going to have to earn that number one pick the hard way.
Hard to believe Minnesota keeps losing like this. They have real major leaguers like Ricky Nolasco and Ervin Santana in the rotation, along with Sano, dozier, Plouffe, and Mauer in the lineup.
@4, I did. I like Williams Perez and I think they can team up to be a major league starter, just probably not one you want in your rotation if you’re trying to contend.
@5, well done.
The Minnesota Twins are unexpectedly bad.
The Williams twins are maybe pretty good!
Max Sherzer is excellent, but he absorbed his twin in utero.
Double post! Firstly to add the ‘c’ to Scherzer and secondly to torture my terrible twin jokes to a deserved death.
#Cubs pitcher John Lackey on Padres’ Christian Bethancourt posing after long homer: “How many home runs does he have? I have a long memory.”
@9..
no new joke deserves death…an arrow aimed at a very small target, there will be somebody who smiles.
Chacun, departez
we had rather they swapped you for Marte
but in all fondness, adieu
A bientot? with the Braves FO just que pensez vous?
Couldn’t we have gotten a real prospect for him at the least?
Obviously not…
Hard to believe the hand-wringing over Jhoulys Chacin has made it into a second thread.
@beege–I think your weird twin poem is strange and excellent.
All joking aside, Williams really looked crisp last night. Spotting a lot of fastballs with authority, rather than just spraying them up there willy-nilly and lobbing in some junk.
Maybe they took a page out of R.A. Dickey’s book and summitted a large mountain…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFl5cCNcB4
Adam McCreery
at the unknown Azusa Pacific why were hitters so leery?
six ten but still growing
he had announced he would stop pitching and start throwing.
Grant Brisbee wants us to keep on keeping on: http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2016/5/11/11653360/braves-very-bad-baseball-team
It’s games like last night that keep one’s fandom alive in a long string of suckiness.
@4 – me too. No one’s going to lose any sleep over Chacin but it’s still weird to give away a 28 yo affordable pitcher who’s actually decent for (essentially) no return. Better than decent probability he turns into a pumpkin soon but the guy we got in exchange is already a pumpkin. It’s strange that our first instinct when someone performs adequately or better is “well we better trade him/ give him away now” rather than “maybe this guy can be useful to the team.” If he was clogging the rotation surely he could have been useful in the bullpen? Or even at AAA?
In a vacuum it’s a minor move that affects very little, but if you add up moves like that, it’s a strange way to build a team.
Erick Aybar
his mother had thought he’d go far
but she hadn’t seen
his glove and the grass and the space in between.
It’s less about Chacin himself and more about what this front office’s process is. If anything, he was demonstrating actual skills improvement this season.
Williams Perez may be able to duplicate Chacin’s expected performance (see what I did there), though, and may have more trade value with more ML starts. That makes more sense to me than calling up Jenkins.
Right now on the Braves website’s depth chart, Daniel Castro is our starter at 2B and 3B. LOL.
@12: Does Chacin have the gout?
So, actually, Max Scherzer has a brother story.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/9130536/detroit-tigers-max-scherzer-pitches
What I don’t understand is: We jettison Chacin, who has pitched well, but keep Bud Norris, who has pitched not well.
The rationalization that we’re opening up opportunity for minor league pitchers doesn’t seem to work under those terms, unless I’m missing something.
Either we’re all missing something, or the front office is.
Go figure.
No one would trade anything for Norris. Jettisoning him would involve no cash savings, no left-handed lottery ticket. Trading Chacin, who’s better than Norris but still not good enough to keep in the way of the young guys (in the Braves’ opinion), saved them $850K (to be reinvested?) and said left-handed lottery ticket.
Thing is, though, if you trade away all the guys who have value, while keeping all the ones who don’t, you end up with a team where Daniel Castro is the starter at two positions.
They replaced Chacin with Perez, not Norris. They cleared a spot on the 40-man and cleared some IP for some young guys whom they need to develop into something better than Chacin. They saved money and added a minor-leaguer.
Not exciting, but perfectly sensible, given the reality of where the organization is.
They could have saved even more money but not signing Chacin in the first place.
The thing about Chacin is, he’s our team leader in Wins. Sure, his one Win ties him with seven other guys, but you don’t just give away your team leader in Wins. Think about clubhouse morale, if nothing else.
28—Right, but since saving money wasn’t the entirety of the goal, they put him on their OD roster. But Chacin served his purpose, so they found a way to be rid of him without incurring additional expense.
Sure. I can’t properly express how little I care about what we do with our roster filler. I’m not worked up about it. The only odd part to me is that he actually showed half-decent results.
Jenkins takes the mound for Gwinnett in about an hour.
Now we just need to rid ourselves of Aybar and keep Mallex in the lineup daily
Hopefully Mr Blair can cut down on his walks and start missing a few more bats tonight.
The only thing I read from the Chacin trade for sure is that Coppy feels pretty secure in his job. If he had any fear that Schuerholtz was going to hold him to the “we won’t ever be this bad again,” standard, he’d have been looking to ACQUIRE another guy like Chacin.
It’s also a clear signal that we’re about done with rent-a-players and in June we’ll be seeing some new youngsters.
Keith Law just posted his Top 100 MLB Draft board. I don’t have Insider so I can only see the top 2: Corey Ray, OF, Louisville, and Jason Groome, LHP, High school.
I think the Braves should draft for need, so I want to see a college OF with the third pick. It seems one of Ray or Kyle Lewis will be there.
Corey Ray apparently projects as a Ray Lankford type. This team could use a Ray Lankford type in our lineup. Hell, we could use a Ray Charles type in our lineup.
What do folks think about Kyle Lewis?
The Chacin trade is a nothingburger, but @26 is a lovely, pithy comment.
About 2 months ago I was the guy defending Chacin’s roster spot. Never dreamed there would be so much garment rending over his departure. The problem was that we didn’t know so many pitchers would be champing at the bit for a call up when we signed chacin. Now he’s expendable. I probably would’ve held him for another month to see if he could build more value, but that has to be weighed against other considerations, such as prospect promotion and development.
@22
Now I feel like a jerk. I was making a joke about his heterochromia.
@37, Kyle Lewis is a RH version of Heyward with a better swing and more power. He’s super-intriguing and maybe at the same time a bit risky. He doesn’t play against top-notch pitching every day, but when he does he still peforms. I would be happy with the pick. I think he’s the best player available that’s not a pitcher.
Was it Lewis whose stock rose dramatically after a good showing in the wood bat Cape Cod league? If so, gimme-gimme.
@37 – I prefer Ray Romano, but all are good choices. Kyle Lewis is #8 no KLaw’s list.
I also think the Phillies are going to take him, so things are somewhat out of our control.
@41, yes he dominated the pitching in the Cape Cod league with a wood bat.
Here are the top 10:
Corey Ray, OF, Louisville
Jason Groome, P, NJ HS
Delvin Perez, SS Int’l
Mickey Moniak, OF, CA HS
AJ Puk, P, UF
Braxton Garrett, P, AL HS
Blake Rutherford, OF, CA HS
Kyle Lewis, OF, Mercer
Matt Manning, P, CA HS
Nick Senzel, 3B, UTenn
Groome has the most upside of any player, from what I have read.
Senzel is a baller, but not a top three pick.
Lewis would appear to fit a lot of what the Braves like (being local, but not a soft tossing lefty)
@21…
we must ask him.
My pics of the top 10..
Delvin Perez…he has nothing to hide…ask what you like.
Mickey Moniac… strange sense of humor, wild laugh.
AJP…WTF?
Braxton Garret…lived a hard life, cold, lonely,can’t even paint.
#42
I liked Ray Romano in “Vinyl” (HBO), although the show was a bit of a glorious mess.
Idiots.
Aybar so needs a glossary entry.
Remove Aybar, not Blair
I’d allow Fredi to manage all year if he walked past the mound all the way to SS, tapped his right arm and motioned for Castro.
Saw this on Twitter…Scout’s take on Erick Aybar is that he doesn’t even look focused this year, far cry from the player he was for Angels.
Cut him
We’re about 3 weeks away from exactly that.
Or maybe 3 hours.
I don’t know why he’s still on this team. Play Castro for a month
So I just got home… this guy Velasquez doesn’t seem to have anything…
Did Gordon Beckham not just deliver a bases loaded double? On the road and can’t watch.
Sounds like I picked the right time to start watching.
What did Aybar do this time?
He made several truly terrible defensive plays, and let a few other slow rollers up the middle get past him that were fielded by the 2B (who was much farther from the ball) for infield hits.
Fredi benched him mid-game. I’m not sure this is real life any more.
We must be nearing the end of the Aybar era. It’s really hard for me to understand why he would be so disinterested in securing a 4-yr deal in the offseason.
@58, he did, and Francouer then tied it up with another hit. This could be the game that ignites our playoff run.
I think it’s very realistic that the Braves use this game as a springboard for winning 89 straight games and securing the NL East title.
One smart, devilishly-handsome fellow has been on Lewis for Atlanta since last September…
The top three in this draft (Lewis, Groome, and Ray) are a cut above the rest, IMO, so the Braves are in a good spot. I’d be happy with any of them.
But I still really, really want Lewis.
We only have so many wins in the quiver. Gotta get this one.
Also, Beckham currently has the second highest OPS on the team.
Beckham has unequivocally been our best offseason acquisition.
Grilli forgot the rule about giving up lead off triples in extras.
Markakis looked pretty bad on that one. That was pretty playable.
Good thing Krol was left in against all those righties.
You just gotta laugh sometimes.
Fredi wouldn’t let Grilli face a lefty but he will let Krol face 3 RH’rs
Krol has mediocre numbers in AAA, but his claim to fame is he held lefties to a .138 BA or something crazy. So what does Fredi do? Brings him in to pitch three RHs. Double-u tee eff?!
It was going to take 6 more innings for us to score another run anyway. It’s better this way.
We’re still tied for fewest wins at Turner
They pinch hit for Ryan Howard with the game on the line…talk about entering a new era…wow.
So the Braves are now 1-5 since thier schedule “lightened up”.
Actually, until Fredi is gone I find myself rooting for the young guys to succeed but the Braves to lose.
Dustin Peterson was a single away from the cycle down in Mississippi tonight. That’s cool.
Mike Soroka had another great start in Rome: 5.2 IP, 1 H, 2 BB, 5 K, 0 Runs. Got his first win on the season. Hey, he doesn’t have any offense either. He’ll adjust well to Atlanta.
Dustin Peterson could be legit. If a RH corner OF bat would emerge from the primordial ooze of our minor league position talent, it would really help our 2017-8 prognostications.
Recapped.