The first pitch of tonight’s game featured a high nineties fastball from Folty that was RDBM into AJ’s waiting glove. He didn’t have to move it an inch.He dropped it.
More of that was to come, from many a Brave, and so a magnificent 7 innings of finely wrought mayhem was wasted. He controlled his pitches better than his emotions in the 8th when things started to unravel with a horrible call but it was heartening to watch what had gone before. He even drove in an ‘insurance’ run late to pad AJ’s early 2 run homer into a 3/0Â lead. Not enough as it turned out as we dribbled/ booted/wild pitched/threw away/Â pass balled/misplayed balls like the Keystone Cops – except it wasn’t funny. RDBM? In these instances, no. Freddy even misplayed a not entirely unreasonable throw with his nose – perhaps he had seen too much, lost trust in the leather. It was a big play.
Colorado were 0 and 43 in games where they came into the seventh innings behind. Chip said so, twice.No more.
There is one other reason we lost tonight which had nothing to do with defense. Blind draw one name at random from your current 9 who must then come to the plate in a late high pressure situation. Or two. Or three. For the Rockies the odds would be good at least 2 and maybe all 3 you could legitimately call ‘hitters’. For the Braves? Maybe one.So when trouble struck in the eighth, the lead then evaporated and almost immediately we were behind one run going into the bottom of the ninth what did we think was going/not going to happen? And it did/didn’t.
Never mind. We must remind ourselves of the hackneyed truism that W/L records for us right now mean much less for the future than the kind of performance Folty put on today. Against an outstanding hitting team he went into the 8th giving up only one legitimate hit and that to a guy leading the league in average. Awesome, exciting.And back to back.
RDBM
An advanced, sophisticated British Baseball Analytic that actually preceded so many of yours. It found early acceptance among the cognoscenti of the time(early 1920’s)and then entered the general lexicon.Translation happily available on request but, before, i’d love to see how many knew/guessed it?
On reflection, probably all.
Right down the bloody middle!
Had a guy at my bar tonight who claimed to have played on the same HS baseball team as Pierzynski and Jonny Damon. I hear a lot of bullshit as a bartender of course, but I believed this guy, and the googleable aspects of his stories all check out. He said AJ was pretty much a lousy hitter until his senior year, whereas the freshman Damon, like Athena, arrived a fully formed god.
@2
Well, that lasted an hour plus.
@3
Athena
tho’ meaner
the bod
of a god.
Johnny Damon
it was obvious even to a layman
had Hollywood flair
the body perfect, but never the mop of that hair.
Perhaps we now know where Smitty’s barber hears about all these trades… In vino, but little veritas.
Greetings from NYC. The airline los my luggage. The Braves lost Folty’s gem. Better luck today.
Greetings from NYC. The airline lost my luggage. The Braves lost Folty’s gem. Better luck today.
Aaron Blair has fallen apart. Like Simms, I think he is a victim of the AAA guys not knowing how to fix him.
Fire the AAA pitching coach posthaste. Hire Leo Mazzone. Pay him a mint.
Yeah, our pitching seems to hit a wall in Gwinnett. Maybe we should send them straight from AA to the AAAA team.
@8
The AAA pitching coach is currently our bullpen coach and the guy there now is just a stand-in until the season is over. This mess is kind of of our own making. Front office probably should’ve told Snitker that we didn’t need Marty Reed (who’s been a really good AAA pitching coach BTW) sitting around in the Atlanta bullpen with his thumb up his butt while the Gwinnett pitching staff went to hell, and that he needed to pick a different bullpen coach. But then, this front office can’t even ensure that Fredi Gonzalez doesn’t get the itinerary for his post-firing trip back to Atlanta until he’s actually fired, that Emilio Bonifacio is actually eligible to be called up before they try to do so, and that they actually have enough slot money left to sign Josh Anthony, so we see what we’re dealing with there.
Yeah. Even Banuelos’s rehab was moved from Gwinnett to Mississippi.
I admittedly don’t know everything a bullpen coach does, but it seems like Marty Reed could help the organization more back in Gwinnett. If a bullpen coach is that important, get Eddie back out there and find some longtime org man like Snider to coach first.
FWIW, present Gwinnett pitching coach Mike Alvarez has been a pitching coach in our system since at least 2011, so it isn’t like we hired some clown off the street.
CORRECTION: Alvarez has been a pitching coach in the organization since 2005.
Press release from 2011:
The Mississippi Braves (AA) will feature a new manager and pitching coach as Rocket Wheeler and Mike Alvarez fill those two roles, respectively … Alvarez joins the Club after serving as the organization’s minor league roving pitching instructor for the last five seasons (2006-10). Alvarez’s other stint as a pitching coach came in 2005 when he led the Richmond Braves staff.
@12
True, but he was slated to be the GCL Braves pitching coach this year, so I’m guessing he’s more of a developmental pitching coach. There’s nothing wrong with that (you need those at the GCL level, after all), but that’s not the guy you want coaching the AAA team, where guys are already 85-90 percent developed.
I’m only seeing four guys who have been worse than expected at AAA. Sims, Ellis, Banuelos, and Blair have all been pretty bad at AAA. How much of that is just adjustment/development?
Plus, some of these guys are simply going to just… not make it through AAA. We don’t need, nor expect, all of these guys to develop into major league pitchers. Some of them will run into the last line of development and not make it. Plus, Sims is only 22, and Ellis is only 23.
@16 I’d say, most.
Its just impossible to know. Pitchers struggle as they are developing and learning to adjust. Which coach do we blame for Newcomb struggling at AA? Or is he allowed to just struggle because we can’t find some post hoc for him?
Teheran had one really bad year at AAA as he was developing. I don’t know how you “know” other than to keep giving them innings. It’s not like we’re urgently waiting on a couple of these guys to complete our championship roster. We’ve got time. Lots of time.
@17
You don’t say?
It’s hard to find examples over the last 5-7 years of how pitching prospects developed simply because we really haven’t developed that many. Beachy and Medlen both had pretty linear paths, but they were used out of relief a lot in the low minors. Minor was pretty linear as well. We’ve band-aid’ed our roster for so long that this is such uncharted territory. And especially since we have more of them than any other team in baseball.
I’m one of the few “win as much as you can in 2016” guys around here, but last night’s loss is totally fine. I didn’t watch the game, but it looks like another great performance by Folty, and if he had a little help, we’d have won. Oh well. If we can get 80% good starting pitching performances for the rest of the year, I’ll be real happy.
Coppolella did a video Q&A that lasted 47 minutes.
http://www.talkingchop.com/2016/7/17/12208626/john-coppolella-did-a-live-askcoppy-for-braves-fans-and-it-was-great-again
Among other things, he talked a bit about the money that they expect to have available. He estimated that they have $60 million committed to players in 2017. Stu, does that sound right to you?
Most of what I have seen its $48-51 committed for 2017
22—Yep, looks to be between $55 and 60 million, at the moment.
Bring in Story to PH and bunt? Ok, thanks
Rich Hill removed after just 5 pitches. Blister issues. That probably hurts his trade value. I’ll bet someone pays our price for Teheran
It is an impressive feat to 3-hit this Rockies lineup, even on the road (away from Coors). Arenado and CGon are no joke. Actually any of their top 5 hitters would bat cleanup for us.
Freddie has been downright terrible since the All-Star break and his surgical procedure. 0 for 11 with 6 Ks. He struck out each time at bat today.
Coppy’s hardest critique of any player during that Q&A was of Matt Wisler. If you can’t listen to it, he essentially said that right now he thinks he’s a 4/5 starter (and in my opinion, it wasn’t clear if he meant he’s a long-term 4/5 starter or if simply right now he was). Coppy knows his player better than we do, and based on how he spoke about everybody else, I wonder if Coppy was potentially communicating to Wisler to “step it up”.
@28- I mean, Freddie gets a pass for playing with a surgical wound with fresh stitches. But can you think of a player who is so good when he’s well and becomes so bad when hampered by a playable injury? It seems like he just can’t play if he’s 90%. He doesn’t hit a lick if he’s injured, and absolutely mashes when he’s well.
@21- Since we aren’t going anywhere this year, I could live with the whole rest of the season playing out like this series. 2 out of 3 sterling pitching performances, lose 2 of 3 but the one win a last at-bat number. If we can’t be good, let’s be lousy excitingly.
Yeah if Wisler wants to be a 4/5, he’s out of luck. We already have a back-end starter in Julio Teheran.
New thread.