Bleh.
So much for capitalizing on the inspirational come-from-behind win on Monday. Let’s win the series tonight.
Natspos delenda est.
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Bleh.
So much for capitalizing on the inspirational come-from-behind win on Monday. Let’s win the series tonight.
Natspos delenda est.
Use code “Journal” for a 5% discount.
From the last thread, re Chip… I feel like if Chip would just take about three heart beats to think about what he is about to say before he blurts it out, he would improve at least three fold as an announcer. The thing that drives me crazy about Chip is the constant mistakes he makes when announcing. The other night with Rio playing third I think he called him Adonis at least three different times. A professional announcer should not be making those kinds of egregious errors. Maybe Chip needs to go try announcing play-by-play for Hockey games. The guys who are good at that can call who has the puck without fail and in real time (which always blows my mind).
Do you think we notice these mistakes because we watch the team on a nightly basis? Do other announcers make factual errors as well? I’m legitimately asking. I don’t know.
I think the Braves saved so much money after their first two picks that they should have something like $500K-1 million available to go over slot today. They should be able to get a really nice prospect in the 11th round. Will be interesting to see.
Chip is an idiot — but he’s our idiot. I like Don and Jim on the radio much more, but I find that I can’t stand most other teams’ announcers. My view is that sports broadcasting is pretty terrible in general, and the ones who are good (Smoltz!) stand out.
I hate it when Chip goes crazy about a routine fly ball out shouting like a 500 yards home run. I am actually enjoying the Mets announcers.
You would think that Joe would teach him how to read the outfielders to get an idea where the ball is going.
Chip is a moron. The Nats announcers might be worse though in terms of pure homerism. Also, I remember the Phillies crew claiming earlier this year that Matt Kemp won an MVP with the Dodgers. Most TV announcers are terrible, I think. Give me Jim and Don any day.
Where are the Professors and Old Righthanders of yesteryear?
11th-round pick is an intriguing one — Drew Lugbauer, a left-handed hitting catcher with power who was a first-teamer in the B1G this year.
I admit the fact that he’s a Bakich recruit/player has me optimistic.
Adonis had finger surgery for a torn ligament. Out 2 months.
Did anybody pick up on the umpire swearing at Daniel Murphy in the second inning last night? Was there anything that preceded it that was noticeable?
On a totally different note!
With Brian having managed more than a full season (last year’s partial and this season to-date) we begin to have fun watching him ascend the Braves managerial rankings. Last night was the 101st loss he’s managed which ties him with Clyde King for 9th on the Atlanta only list (Clyde went 96-101, finishing ’74 and starting ’75 as the Braves dropped into their late ’70s funk). The 101 losses tie him for 25th on the all-time list, with both King, and Johnny Kling who went 52-101-2 in 1912). Chuck Dressen is next with 124 losses.
Snitker is 28th in victories and 27th in games managed, both behind Clyde!
And another college catcher in the 12th, Hagen Owenby from East Tennessee State. Great name!
@2, I don’t think so. Like Jay says @4 Don and Jim are much better and I probably listen to as many games on radio as I watch on TV and I never notice Don or Jim (or Joe for that matter) making the same kind of mistakes Chip makes. Also, like I said earlier in hockey the announcers are incredible (I have no idea how they are able to do what they do). I watch a good bit of hockey with different announcers and don’t see the same mistakes either. I will admit I only watch Braves baseball so I am limited in my sample size for baseball announcers (Chip, Joe, Don and Jim with the occasional other team announcers or someone filling in for ours (Lemke, Smoltz, Glavin, etc.)). Chip stands out in my mind against every other sports announcer so I don’t think it’s just because we get to hear him more often.
If you have MLB Extra Innings a good way to hear other announcers and ‘skip’ Braves commercials in the process is to pick out a second game and go there at the end of every half inning. There’s no doubt who are best, the Mets with Darling and Hernandez but i’m guessing that payroll is way ahead of ours. Worst? try the Nats this afternoon, ugh.
Monotone kills play by play, we certainly don’t have that problem with Chip.
blazon,
On the radio side of the app, listen to the Mets’ Howie Rose and the Cubs’ Pat Hughes. They really know how to put you on the field.
I don’t have the depth of draft knowledge to say anything definitive, but it doesn’t look like the Braves are going after any players with higher bonus demands today which leads me to believe they have deals spending most of our pool on the top 2 guys already. The only one drafted in the first 8 rounds today even ranked in the BA top 500 was Lugbauer (378).
I’ll trust the scouts though, the BA top 500 isn’t everything.
Actually only 5 players listed in the BA 500 through our first 18 picks:
Wright (2)
Waters (23)
Tarnok (170)
Rodgers (396)
Lugbauer (378)
On MLB.tv, there’s this great option to listen to the radio broadcast feed while watching, that’s probably not news.
Of radio announcers: I, too, and a Pat Hughes fan. He’s knowledgeable, funny; his voice just fits somehow with the very sound of the game and the ballpark. Used to team with the late and much missed Ron Santo (may he rest in peace) and the two of them were truly great together. (Santo’s replacement, Ron Coomer, isn’t too bad, either.)
Also recommend Tom Hamilton the Cleveland Indians’ radio guy. I’ll tune him in anytime I need a baseball fix and the Braves aren’t available. Knows the game and has a natural feel for the pace of things.
There’s a slight call to play disconnect that way, timo, but not enough to bother me. I listen to the tv call because I like curmudgeon Joe.
Unpopular opinion (and long post) alert:
I’ve listened to both frequently, though I do watch the TV broadcast more than I listen to the radio one, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the TV broadcast is a better overall fan experience, relatively speaking (meaning that I’m eliminating the fact that you can actually see what’s going on through one but not the other as a factor here).
First of all, Jim and Don espouse a great deal of the same get-off-my-lawn drivel that Chip and Joe do, if not worse, but just seem to always get a pass on it. Meanwhile, if Chip and Joe so much as lightly push back on a new statistical line of thinking or something in that regard, they get crucified on here. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that more people watch the game than listen to it, but I always laugh when I see some derivation of “There go Chip and Joe again talking about [bunting/closer usage/lineup construction/whatever]. Jim and Don are just so much more enjoyable to listen to.” I like to think that over on radio at the exact same time, Don is telling the same damned story about Gene Mauch and bunting that he tells every game or is complaining about the pitcher being pulled with two outs in the sixth.
An example: I was driving around the other night and thus was listening to Jim and Don. Don mentioned something about complete games (I can’t remember the context of how they initially got into this), and Jim said something like, “Complete games? What are those? Millennials are listening and have no idea what you’re talking about…” As a throwaway line, it was fine, even somewhat amusing…no problem.
The problem came the next half-inning, when they proceeded to spend 15 minutes coming up with things millennials had no idea about. By the end of it, they were claiming that nobody under the age of 30 knew of the existence of Sandy Koufax. It got really insufferable. I know it started as a tongue-in-cheek thing, but by the end it came off as really bitter and ridiculous. If Chip and Joe had tread anywhere near the point where Jim and Don ended that conversation, they probably would’ve been forced to issue a public apology or something.
There are a couple of factors at play here. First, everyone already hated Chip Caray when he came in. He’d been fired from his network job for egregious errors, his goofiness can rub people the wrong way, and he wasn’t his dad. And he’d spent a long time as a network announcer (nobody likes those) and a Cubs announcer (nobody likes them). To combine two of the issues, his goofiness is less sarcastic and cynical than his dad’s goofiness was, so can come off as more annoying. Meanwhile, nobody knew anything whatsoever about Jim Powell when he came in, so he got the clean slate which it never would’ve been possible for Caray to get.
Second, between Don Sutton and Joe Simpson, only one of them has ever called Atlanta fans idiots on national TV, so far as I know. Now, if you think for one second that Sutton wouldn’t have called the fans idiots if he had been announcing the infield fly game on network TV, you’re nuts. Hell, for all I know he did do that on the Braves Radio broadcast. But that is a factor for why a bunch of people don’t like Joe.
Jim is a better play-by-play guy than Chip, and I don’t think there’s much doubt about that, but he can be every bit as annoying and goofy about random stuff as Chip can, as far as I can tell, just in a different way (less puns, more making fun of Don for being old). His technical superiority (if you wanna call it that), though, is more than offset by the fact that the Braves Radio broadcast is an utter shambles when Don is doing play-by-play. You literally have no idea what in the hell is happening for at least three innings every night, and potentially for game-deciding innings if it goes extra innings and Don comes back on. It is a train wreck!
His call of Inciarte losing the ball in the lights the other night, for instance, consisted of him going back to analyze Ender losing the ball while runners where rounding the bases. What in the hell is happening, Don? How many runs are scoring? Did Ender actually throw the ball back to the infield or did he die of embarrassment? Did the ball stay in play or bounce over the fence for a ground-rule double? The next batter’s about to come up and we don’t know how many runs scored or where the current baserunners are!
Combine that with the fact that Jim and Don are hopeless corporate shills to a degree that Chip and Joe don’t generally stoop. And I know that Jim and Don are probably technically employees of the Braves while Chip and Joe are probably technically employees of Fox Sports, but still… Every time Braves PR comes up with some ridiculous line about the new stadium or the rebuild or whatever (Turner Field wasn’t a real baseball stadium…Traffic concerns at SunTrust Park are all a bunch of hooey…This bench anchored by Emilio Bonifacio is going to be A-OK, I don’t know what people are complaining about…Fans should be grateful for the opportunity to have the Braves force them to buy their parking in advance…One day: Anybody who’s not in that clubhouse every day has no idea what they’re talking about when they say Fredi Gonzalez has lost the team; Next day: You know, it was just time for a change. It sucks, because we like Fredi personally, but a bunch of stuff had slipped and you could tell when you entered the clubhouse every day, etc.), they’ll be sure to work it into their broadcast. It’s especially of note given that one of the complaints about Chip is that he’s not his dad. If you think Skip Caray would’ve picked up the PR line about Turner Field not actually being a baseball stadium or would’ve been shilling for a sub-10 win Fredi Gonzalez in mid-May, then throwing him under the bus the next day after he was fired…well, let’s just say I’m pretty sure you’d be incorrect.
Jim and Don are at their best in close, late-inning situations where they’re focused on the game. Jim is focused on calling the game, Don is focused on analyzing the game (and it’s not extra innings, so it’s Jim and not Don doing play-by-play, it probably goes without saying). In those situations, the radio broadcast is vastly superior to the TV one. But Jim and Don can get pretty grating in all other situations, and I find the TV broadcast (while not great) to be a better overall experience because of it.
Sweet we just drafted Jake Taylor, C
I wonder if he’s still with Rene Russo? Those knees can’t be getting any better though.
Dusty @ 22,
That’s what we need, a live chicken.
Bats, they are sick. I cannot hit curveball. Straightball I hit it very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. I ask Jobu to come, take fear from bats. I offer him cigar, rum. He will come.
Well done, Nick.
@21, I agree with you on the radio broadcast. I listen to them quite a bit as I try to time my evening commute with a Braves game whenever possible. They are nails-on-a-chalkboard to me. The main theme for the past couple seasons has been anti-intellectual/anti-sabre/anti-everything-new.
You can also listen for 10 minutes and have no idea what the score is. The whole product sucks.
@26
I forgot about that, but you’re right. You’ve got no chance of getting a score with Don, but even with Jim, sometimes he’ll go a full half-inning without saying the score, even when going to or coming out of a commercial break. One time I timed 20 minutes between when I turned the game on and when I found out what the score actually was.
The Mets announcers on both radio and tv are great. Top of the industry right now, imho. Our guys can be bad, but hey they are our guys, I’m not going to get too worked up over it.
I have always liked Hawk, and Vin Scully bored me to tears, so I will freely admit that tastes will vary and respect dissenting opinions on the subject. To each his own.
It’s a bad year to be a flyball pitcher.
Anyone else think that play with Kemp was worth a challenge?
Kemp out of the game. Hamstring injury.
I imagine if Kemp goes on the DL that Jace will come back up. He has almost a 1000 OPS at Gwinnett.
If Kemp is out I would rather see Dustin Peterson get AB’s over Jace.
Brandon Phillips is having himself a day.
Always fun watching a good Julio outing.
33 — Perhaps, but Dustin only has about 100 PAs at Gwinnett and hasn’t hit for power. Also, Jace is the only other position player on the 40 man, though they could move Adonis to the 60 day DL to make room. Since it would probably only be 2 weeks I would think they would go with Jace and avoid starting Dustin’s clock.
I agree, just stating my preference. Jace doesn’t have a bat or a glove.
Remember when JJ Schwarz was gonna go 1/1? He went 1129. Not an exact science.
Kemp is day to day according to Snitker.
@38, wow. Does he have another year of eligibility?
JJ has a year left. I think he’ll be back to Florida, obviously.
In other news, Julio is pitching so much better this year, as reflected by his .600 winning pct
I want Medlen in my life: 6 IP, 7H, 3R, 2ER, 1BB, 2K, 2HR (79 pitches/56 strikes)
Free Medlen!
Simba is having himself a nice season. Game winning HR last night and a season OPS .760. Good for him.
Today is a good day. It’s June 15th which means 1-year veterans can be traded without their consent. Will the youth movement be in full swing soon? We can only hope.
@42 JohnWDB are you referencing commentary from Chip and Joe last night re: Julio to that effect?
(paraphrasing)
“Julio hasn’t had his good stuff very much this season and consequently his ERA sucks, but check out how many wins he has – does that give you optimism for the remainder of his season?”
“Why yes it does!”
The funny thing is, Chip and Joe (and this probably holds for nearly all baseball announcers) are happy to mention the role run support has on pitcher W-L record when a home team pitcher can’t get Ws despite a good ERA, like Julio did last season. On some level, they must understand that W-L record is essentially out of the pitcher’s control and is a poor measure of pitcher quality. And yet, they persist with the stupid Old School Baseball tropes even when they know better (and most of the fans know better too).
I guess what I’m saying is this – Chip and Joe, I get that you’re openly contemptuous of sabermetric concepts, but do you also have to make a mockery of the concepts of logical consistency and cause-and-effect?
Recapped.
I’m sorry, but Chip’s just not a very good broadcaster. Nepotism is sometimes misapplied to very talented people who follow in their family’s footsteps, but in this case I seriously doubt Chip would be employed by a major league team if it wasn’t for his last name. I used to like Joe Simpson a lot, especially his zany sense of humor, but after years of not having anyone to work with I think it’s rubbed off on him and made him worse. He’s not as funny as he used to be; as straight as Chip is, he isn’t a very good straight man. As for Chip, his negatives are legion: He doesn’t have good instincts about baseball, notice whenever it’s a trivia question his answers make me suspicious if he even follows the sport with any seriousness; he’s got a nice voice but he overuses it and that halting laugh thing makes it excruciating to listen to him…you know it’s coming and *damn* there it was and just wait a little bit and *damn* there it is again! I could go on.
Everything negative that’s been said about Don’s play calling abilities is absolutely spot on. They should just do away with the switching places thing and let Jim Powell handle calling the whole game. I don’t know why they don’t. But Don’s got a lovable quality that makes him endearing, and of the four broadcasters Jim Powell is the only one you could say has any professional polish to him and I appreciate that about him. But, yeah, they could announce the score of the game more often. That kind of thing seems easy to fix. Write a letter?