A little over the top but, dear me, PLEASE. Just when we thought we had taken advantage of some crazy errors and base running by the Phils in the eighth and ninth and had then been rescued from the brink of yet another one run loss by Phillips’ 2 out homer to tie…and Dansby had bump started and scored the go ahead run in the top of the tenth…and JJ had runners on but with two vital outs in the bottom of that innings…a double was laced off the right field wall to score the tying and winning runs. Yeah, done that.
So no more narrative, it’s redundant . Instead some thoughts on individuals, there is plenty to like.
GARCIA …great outing, much his best, pretty much perfect for 5 but then tired and left things up in the 6th when i thought Snit was slow to take him out. Even so we were still tied going into the 7th, 2-2. That was hardly a typical performance you would expect from a number five starter. Good for him.
ENDER…how strange this game is…2 for his last 23 or something, seemingly out of confidence again after his earlier heroics at STF…he has looked these last few nights like he did at the beginning of last year…but then, when he broke out, he sustained it and had a terrific second half, no streaks there. He is so important as lead off for us – Freddie’s solo home runs really infuriate. Ender is a plus plus asset for us,may he refind his touch and soon.
ADONIS…I’m biased, i like him but, sure, if and when we can get a leftie up from Gwinnet then a platoon, sure. His defense has greatly improved after a shaky start, I like him because he hits the ball hard, to all fields. With men on base i shudder too, just a little more elevation please. Picture perfect play with Flowers tonight on the caught stealing at 3rd.
FREDDIE…he’s a rock, on base four times tonight. Three were walks though, we need Kemp to get going to stop that. And a couple on in front please.
KEMP…there’s not much subtlety as to how they are pitching him – away, away, away.(When he had his hot start did he ever hit hard to right field?) The one time when a breaking pitch to the outside broke back over the plate was the first time i remember him hitting a solid line drive, to CF for a single.
NECK…nothing tonight but he has been a rock lately. Was anyone else surprised though that he made seemingly no real effort to catch the line drive to his left that won the game, gave up on it? Or was the camera angle deceptive, reducing the lateral distance between him and the ball?
PHILLIPS… Well, how many of us were quite wrong in this department. Lovely tying homer. He is making solid contact. Comic cuts incident defensively late in the game when first he and then Dansby could not get the ball out of their gloves to make an easy out. Back to back, successive plays.
FLOWERS…total respect for this guy…pending some future phenom arrival he is a major asset to this club in his all round play. Even throwing out base runners, the throw to third tonight to Adonis was perfect. I bet it surprised you as much as it did me. He is another rock in our line up.
DANSBY…Some smiles in the dugout tonight with Freddie after a line drive deep to the wall in RCF had been brilliantly caught to thwart him yet again. And then he scored the go ahead run in the 10th. He is coming round, can you imagine the pressure, what it feels like to be carrying the Number Two tag while you endure a horrible April. The smiles, his very much included, made my day.
BULLPEN…For a change the bats didn’t lose the game tonight, the Pen did. The three usual suspects were all just a tad ugly , not their usual metronomic selves, but they got away with it until JJ allowed two on with two out and then left an outside pitch up. Short and sweet.
PLAY OF THE NIGHT, the HaHa Department.
By our esteemed opponents who, generally, have fielded brilliantly.Dansby on first, late, one out, ground ball to second baseman. He had the choice for the sure out at first.
But, suddenly, mirabile dictu, he saw what he took to be his short stop streaking to cover third from what would be an outrageous attempt by Dansby to continue to third. So he threw a bullet across the infield to third base, perfect throw. But no one was there.
Except the grateful Dansby, a few seconds later, as the errant throw to nobody ricocheted away off the fence.
We needed that memory, to fight the numb ending.
Thank you, Blazon. Looking forward to watching Braves baseball for first time in a while. I hope they decide to play today.
Really like today’s lineup:
#Braves lineup: Inciarte 8, Phillips 4, Freeman 3, Kemp 7, Markakis 9, Suzuki 2, Peterson 5, Swanson 6, Foltynewicz 1
Other than Suzuki, of course.
Great recap. I’m liking Flowers more and more every time he plays.
I was also surprised to see Markakis give up on that game winning hit to right. Not only that he didn’t make much of an effort to catch it, but once it landed he made no attempt to throw it in and catch the runner at home. Just bad body language and attitude.
Glad to see Phillips in the 2-hole. Not a fan of Adonis up there.
Flowers’ CS% has also tripled in the small sample size. He’s thrown out 44% of baserunners (4 of 9).
The 20-25 spots on the roster will probably cost us more games than the sum of the expected WAR from those spots. I’d imagine the guys on the back end of a good roster are just a bunch of .3, .5 WAR guys, and they probably add up to 2-3 WAR at most. But with all of these one-run losses, I wonder if a key pinch hit, a defensive replacement, a legitimate LOOGY, or simply more good one inning relievers would be turning these one-run losses into wins. I wouldn’t point to the actual events (obviously we’d have had JJ in the game last night at that interval), but the domino effect as the game goes along that compounds into a loss, I think, is what is happening.
With that said, I don’t fault JC for not spending an extra $10 million on the back end of the roster when those 6 to 7 games don’t make a difference in the playoff picture, and he probably rather put that money in the international market or another vehicle to get young players.
Wow, an 8 pictch first inning for Folty with 2 K’s!
Ask a Brave feature: kid asks Folty what his favorite movie is. Folty says “Wolf of Wall Street”. Great job Folty.
@7
I was coming on here specifically to mention that, as well.
Folty (after declaring “The Wolf of Wall Street” is his favorite move): Maybe watch that one when you’re a little older.
(piece ends)
Chip: A little?!?!?!
I want to thank Game, Blauser for his generosity in reply in the last thread. Looks like a great comprehensive advice column on financial management. The answer is, “it depends” and there isn’t an easy answer unless you’ve got high interest loans to pay off first.
@5
First of all, if we’re finishing around .500, which all people involved with the Braves seemed to think (or at least say), six or seven games absolutely can be the difference between making the playoffs and not.
But that aside, the general point is that the non-starting part of this roster is completely inadequate. It’s an absolute joke, in fact, and if you spend all offseason talking about finishing .500 and competing and blah blah blah, putting a roster out there that is almost incapable of winning close ballgames is dereliction of duty. They don’t lose anything measurable as far as the “rebuild” by putting a palatable bullpen and bench together. It really pisses me off that they knew what they had and did nothing about it. If, as I think may have happened, Snitker talked him into some of these guys, it’s Coppy’s job as a GM to tell him that this isn’t Triple-A, and it isn’t last year’s dumpster fire, either. A major league roster requires major league players. If that means he doesn’t get to have Anthony Recker or Emilio Bonifacio or Chase d’Arnaud or Ian Krol on his roster, well that’s just too damned bad.
Again, I’m sick to death of watching losing baseball. It’s time to start trying to win, and that can take a variety of forms. Suffice it to say that you don’t have to trade away any prospects worth a damn to have somebody better than Emilio freaking Bonifacio or whichever catcher isn’t starting as your go-to bench bat.
The bench is embarrassing and pitiful, and it is kind of soul-killing to watch us lose every one-run game. I don’t quite see the point in signing Colon and Dickey if you’re going to throw games. On the other hand, our bench makes total sense if you’re tanking.
Folty looks really good today.
…and he now has a run!
@11
But for all the reasons previously stated, it’s pretty clear that we’re not.
Right. I’ve said that they wanted to be competitive/respectable, and I still believe that, but it’s basically a penny-wise, pound-foolish strategy of spending $35-40 million on average pitching and skimping on bench and middle relief
@14
Fair enough
Get a small lead, gag it back up. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To be devil’s advocate, a lot of this is actually bad luck. I checked yesterday and our OBP and SLG were both above average, yet we were something like 25th in runs scored. That strong OBP is not converting to runs, and that is likely the wrong side of variance.
Key issue: if you had a guy you’d be willing to burn to get one out, then we’d be winning right now. When they had two on, could they have brought in someone that’s nasty on righties (maybe Jose Ramirez?) to get out of that inning with the lead. But you have to save Ramirez because you may need him down the road. JOSE RAMIREZ should not be a vital part of your pen and thus influencing in-game decisions. You burn someone like Ramirez to get an out.
With that said, I liked that they let Folty finish 7 innings. Two start really good starts from him, this time with a plethora of strikeouts.
But big point is that Coppy is 0-2 in assembling rosters that can win games. It’s one thing to lift off fringe prospects from teams looking to contend and sell off elite players to the highest bidder (basically the two trades he makes), but he has yet to build a 25-man roster, and I do wonder if we even have 10 of the most valuable players on the 25-man roster. Yadda, yadda, don’t rush the players, but do we even have 10 of the 25 most valuable players? Have to draw a line somewhere.
@17
Yes, I do think we have had some bad luck. But if we finish today at 6-12, I’m not sure how much you can chalk that up to bad luck. And when so many are such close games, you have to wonder if you’re seeing a trend in roster composition.
To be fair, Coppy wasn’t trying to win last year. This roster is the first built to compete for middle-of-the-pack. I wouldn’t worry about the record for another 25 games. This looks like a team with average hitting, average starting pitching, a bad bullpen, and the worst bench in baseball. That adds up to a 75-win team over the full season. We might start 6-12 but we have too much talent to go 54-108
Dansby Swanson with the early front-runner for Garbage At-Bat of the Year…
@20 this team won’t sniff 75 wins. Hell, 55 is looking more likely.
How long does Swanson bat .130 before getting sent to Gwinnett?
I wonder what kind of prospects we will get for Colon, Dickey, Garcia, and anyone else on a 1 year contract.
Kolby Allard: 5 IP, 0 R, 1 BB, 5 K.
Too bad he only threw 87 IP last year. I guess that means he can throw 120-130 this season, and maybe 160-170 the next.
Mike Soroka pitched 143 IP last season, so his limit might be around 175 IP this season. If he continues to pitch well and we eventually sell off our 3 rental starting pitchers, he could feasibly join the big league rotation as a 19 year old.
Luiz Gohara only pitched 70 IP last season, so I guess around 100 IP is his limit this season.
@24, nobody is giving up real prospects for our pitching, unless the deal involves Folty. The “rebuild” doesn’t hinge on third and fourth tier filler that we may or may not get from one-year rentals. It hinges on our ability to field a lineup that isn’t the worst in the league.
I don’t see how the position player needs are going to get fixed in a timely fashion. They are going to have to double payroll to fix what needs fixing.
@23, Swanson’s leash should be a long one since we’re not going to be competitive. I’d say the same for any of our other young position player prospects that were off to slow starts, except that we don’t have any…
27 — That’s not necessarily true. We got Travis Demeritte for Lucas F. Harrell and Dario “I don’t know where the ball is going” Alvarez. There will be “contenders” desperately searching for that one more starting pitcher.
Swanson has hit into a lot of bad luck. He is still playing good defense.
Folty was good. There’s that. Kemp homered. That’s good too. Otherwise, my Braves viewing left much to be desired.
Is Albies really in New York?
AAA is in Rochester.
Even those on shorter innings limits, I wonder what the harm is of letting Allard and Soroka pick up some junk innings in Atlanta in August and September. Fried threw 100 IP last year, so maybe 140 IP this year? I read on Twitter that Collmenter is getting worked into a middle relief role, so maybe we see Wisler and Blair in a long relief role? Might not be a bad idea for them to get to work in low pressure, short stints instead of getting thrown into the rotation while being shuttled back and forth to Gwinnett. And seriously, this pen freaking sucks, so really, what do we have to lose?
Make no mistake, we’ll be impressed with what we get in return for Garcia, Colon, and Dickey. As frustrating as these close losses are, those guys are doing what they need to be doing, and we’ll probably get 3 guys back that will end up in our top 30 this year. I hope there’s a way we can package some players (like one of the SP and Phillips) to get a really elite, top 50 in all of baseball prospect.
Recapped.