The Braves were limited to 4 hits as the Phillies sweep the series 3 – 0.
Philadelphia opened the scoring in the bottom of the 2nd, as Andrew Knapp hit his first home run of 2021. If history is any indication, he will hit another one before the year is out.
Zach Eflin shut down the Braves until the 7th, when Travis d’Arnaud hit his first homer of the season. Eflin went 7, allowing 4 hits and a walk, and struck out 8. Per tradition, the Braves bullpen had to cover a few more innings than that, but Ian Anderson was effective in the 5 innings he lasted. Ian allowed 4 hits, walked 2, and struck out 7, on 88 pitches.
The Phillies got the game winner in the 8th, as Chris Martin allowed 3 consecutive 1 out singles before leaving with an issue with his fingers. Tyler Matzek and A.J. Minter each struck out the side in the 6th and 7th respectively.
The Braves has a small threat in the 9th, as Hector Neris worked around a couple of 2 out walks. Neris had to work hard for those walks, as an unusually large strike zone helped the teams combine for a 24:5 K/BB ratio.
The Braves may or may not play on Monday in Washington; the game is a GO at this writing. The Nationals have 11 players affected by Covid protocol, and have yet to play this season. At this point, MLB’s position has been not to hold the teams accountable for outbreaks. If the series is played, the Braves will have the pleasure of facing the opponents top 3 pitchers in back to back series, starting with Drew Smyly vs. Max Scherzer at 4:05.
Looks like opener with Nats is postponed.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/31195239/atlanta-braves-washington-nationals-game-monday-postponed-sources-say
Thanks Kirk.
Braves have lost every day since Opening Day.
April 1: Lost to Phillies
April 2: Lost the All-Star game
April 3: Lost to Phillies
April 4: Lost to Phillies
I’ve seen this show before…
https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/ATL/2019-schedule-scores.shtml
Not worried. 🙂
I’m not heartbroken about not being able to play a game on the road against a tough division rival when our bats aren’t piling on the runs, but it sure has made for one heck of a first week.
Wednesday v. Nats straight Doubleheader, noon.
If the baseball gods are just (which may be asking a lot), yesterday will mark the high point of the 2021 season for the Phillies and the low point for the Braves.
Continued….
Holy crap, I totally missed that.
That’s going to put a lot of pressure on teams to scout and draft well because it’ll be a free-for-all after round 20 with that many undrafted free agents.
But with so many fewer teams, doesn’t the draft have to shrink?
I hadn’t realized that and I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense that shrinking the minor leagues also allows them to shrink the draft, though cutting out 20 rounds seems like a lot. It makes me vaguely hopeful that there might be more Brandon Beachys lurking out there in independent leagues, but what it really means is that there’s just less baseball in America and ultimately less reason for kids to grow up dreaming of the big leagues when they could always grow up to be accountants.
@6
Of the 7-inning variety — which, despite it being an abomination, I admit I enjoyed last year.
@12 Agreed.
I am somewhat good with 7 inning doubleheaders, I am vehemently opposed to the putting a runner on 2nd base in extras abomination. That’s not baseball! What is this, tee ball? Stop messing with the greatest game ever invented.
I can justify the 7-inning games in that 5 (or 4 1/2, depending) innings has always counted as a full game under certain circumstances. And I can justify the extra inning baserunner in that baseball is a social construct, non-existent per the tenets of ontological nihilism, and therefore essentially non-meaningful.
(Also, Jose Urena got lit the eff up today, and you truly love to see it.)
@14. I’m with Chief on this one. I can see the reason for the 7 inning dh games. But strongly oppose the 2b runner rule in extras. At the least for several innings they should stick with the regular rules.
Anything that results in the humiliation of Jose Urena is A-OK with me!
Folty has given up 4 runs in 3 innings for Texas today.
Pretty weak trolling, MR BILL. You should know this is a politics-free zone.
I like the 7 inning double headers and hate the runner on 2nd. That one is throwing off pitching stats comparisons since time immemorial.
I’m actually OK with the extra innings rule, which surprises me, since I hate just about all changes. Extra innings are pretty much a home-leaning coin flip anyway. By adding a little more run-scoring volatility, you make it slightly less home-leaning. Admittedly, it devalues teams with deep bullpens a tiny bit.
He returns!
It is just barely possible that MR. BILL is I Luv Emma Stone after an unfortunate brain injury. But for now, he is staying on the right side of the line, so the bar is open… But remember! No shirt, no shoes, no service.
Was I Luv Emma Stone the best troll on here? We should have a tournament.
Today I realized that the Braves are playing @ Blue Jays, and since the Jays are not allowed to play in Toronto, that puts them at their Spring Training complex 20 minutes from the house. So I bought my tickets, and I get to see regular season Braves and be home that night! Considering it’s a real game at a Spring Training complex, it should be a more intimate affair. I’ll moon Chip Caray.
Clearly, we have lost all the games so far because I was not yet vaccinated. That changes tomorrow, so look forward to that first W.
Congrats, Eephus. But just in case, I’m getting my second on Friday, in case that’s the problem.
Oh, and there’s no question that I’m short a lot more than a few fries.
I remember what used to happen to Mr. Bill on Saturday Night Live. Have a feeling that something similar is going to happen here pretty soon.
I very much look forward to Ryan pushing the eject button on Mr. Bill. Good grief!
I agree that I’m pretty OK with seven-inning doubleheaders. They’ve gotta wait until at least the 12th inning before implementing the runner-on-second rule, though, IMO. You want to try and ensure that the 19-inning regular-season game is a thing of the past? OK, I get it. But there’s no reason why the 10th and 11th innings can’t be played straight up. I wouldn’t implement the new rule until the 13th inning, if I had my druthers.
Troll Dept.: Who was the Keystone Light guy? I got a kick out of him.
Went to O’s/Yanks tonight & saw Giancarlo hit a GSHR that landed in Yonkers. A 6:35 start, a total of 9,008 in the joint tonight (“pod” seating) & it was pretty weird (no draft beer?), but… on the whole, it was great to be back at the ballpark — exactly 18 months after the last time. Yay, baseball.
The thread is much better now. Sorry for the the delay. Family is on vacation now and I try my best to stay away from the technologies.
@33, that was Jon K!
gadfly comes to mind.
Mr. Bill, this is your final warning. We don’t do this sorta thing here. Be nice or I’ll have to drop the hammer.
Sorry all. If the team is waiting on me to get vaccinated, I’m in line for the Johnson & Johnson one. It could be a while…
That’s okay, DS. I just took a moral stand on one of the most important issues facing our country: I drafted Ian Anderson 137th overall in my fantasy draft last night. I think that should balance it out.
How come Colorado gets to have voter ID and the 2021 All-Star game? Colorado also has fewer days of early voting allowed than the egregious Jim Crow law Georgia apparently passed, what the hell, MLB?
The days are upon us where the MLB is like the NBA; you simply cannot be a fan of the sport without being bludgeoned over the head with politics. I genuinely wonder how Mac, were he around, would handle this. This is not the way baseball was 15 years ago. The way politics has infused other major sports, baseball has now followed suit. My political opinions are irrelevant, but I think we can all agree that baseball was better off when it didn’t go down the compromising routes that it did.
The simple thing is China. China is not divisive in a business discussion. We all buy products from China. But when you infuse politics into a situation, and then you’re still in bed with China, I’m sorry but you’ve lost all credibility. And baseball had avoided that issue for as long as it could. The NBA, to make a buck, has stepped on that landmine countless times. But Manfred folded like a cheap table, like he often does.
I would also like the record to show that when the Atlanta Braves moved their stadium to Cobb County, there was an inherent but subtle political discussion by those that didn’t like the move on this blog which was allowed to occur. Like I said, my political opinions are irrelevant about the voting law and everything that caused it, but expressing your displeasure and pointing out how hypocritical the decision was is akin to those who voiced their displeasure about the stadium move. We didn’t ask for this discussion; it was FORCED on us.
IMO, the bar should either be disciplined enough to either stick to the no politics rule, or not have it. These subtle dalliances being bandied about lately aren’t cutting it.
Personally, as someone who enjoys the combativeness and nasty invective of politics, I’m fine either way. I understand the POV of those that want not a scintilla of politics.
I think the no-politics line is often more blurry than bright. Sam was a guy who stepped over it quite frequently, among many other lines that he stepped over. I wouldn’t say the conversation was “allowed to occur” so much as it did occur, but as much as possible, I and others tried to encourage fellow commenters to keep it above the belt and as far from overt partisanship as possible.
I agree with you that it’s super-hard to avoid politics altogether — lots of things have become overtly politicized in a way that they weren’t before. I still think that the core of the no-politics rule is exactly right: in order to ensure that this blog remains a place where we can all come as friends who have our love of the Braves in common, we voluntarily choose to leave our heated political opinions at the door, or else we risk what happens anywhere else on the web: some people start calling each other names, and other people no longer feel welcome.
I am quite certain that I do not share the same political views as many of the other people here, and that makes Braves Journal special: in the rest of my life outside of Braves Journal, most of my closest friends have similar political perspectives to mine. But here, that doesn’t matter; what matters is whether Pablo Sandoval will really hold a spot on the roster all year even if Drew Waters is ready.
So again, I think the no-politics line is self-enforced, and it’s always a judgment call rather than a set of obvious thou-shalt-not commandments. But for the good of the blog, I think Braves Journal is best when we all are able to like each other. And the minute we start debating the political merits of a hot-button issue is when a lot of us will stop liking a lot of others of us.
I’m less concerned with where a meaningless game is going to be played than I am about getting a win under our belts. It would be very Barves-y to lose this series to the Nats, despite their COVID woes. Let’s hope the team finally gets those hard hit balls to land on the grass or in the seats.
#44
Yup. In the same boat…
Politics… love to read about it, love to discuss it, love to be involved. Always have. For the most part, I can go round-n-round with it.
But for a sports blog/forum, it doesn’t really work, IMO. And to my way of thinking, politics can be easily sidestepped here, stepped over or almost completely ignored. Not sure why that’s at all difficult.
I’ll be honest and state that I haven’t been able to handle the volatile political discourse coming mostly from one side directed at the other of late. It’s been enough that I’ve eventually dropped some sites because I’m not going to sit there and be labeled with words ending in -ist and -phobic while being told the world will be a better place after I’m dead even though I’m the left-leaning libertarian who believes in letting people live as long as their protections don’t infringe on my rights. 🙂
As far as MLB’s politics are concerned, always figure that any decisions they make likely carry greater financial gains than any virtue points.
!!
Alright crew, this blog has acted as a baseball blog with a fairly strict policy against infiltration of politics. The game has dipped into the political realm several times since Mac starts this blog. There have also been times when it’s gotten heated. Let’s respect each other’s viewpoints enough to leave it be for now.
If there are enough people that want to respectfully debate political infiltration in baseball, I can open a side page and put it in the menu.
I’m with Eephus–looking for the batted ball luck to start turning around. Odd thing how the Braves are unlucky in another way: because of the strange start to the Gnats’ season, we likely face their one and two starters with our 4 and 5 starters (really 5 and 6 if you count Soroka). But I’d still rather be the Braves than the Natspos any day, and it would be a baseball-like thing to beat their top starters with our bottom of the rotation.
And amen to @44 and 46. I love a good political discussion, but I also love this blog. Let’s all resist the impulse to approach the politics line in this bar.
Sobotka and Weigal were traded for Arcia. Nice job clearing 40 man space and getting a useful defender in return.
Weigel and Sobotka are gone….hope the best for them
If we want politics talk, please make it a side page, and I wish Weigel and Sobotka the best of luck.
Now lets get a win.
Braves gave up a lot of height–over 13 feet!–but not much else to get a former top prospect who’s still only 26.
Great trade. I had been high on Weigel for a long time, but it seems he’s not at all the same pitcher post surgery.
I agree that Sobotka, at least, was first in line to hit the waiver wire anyway, but what does Orlando Arcia do for us that Sean Kazmar doesn’t? Or Adrianza, Camargo, Kipnis, etc… I do wonder if this means that Adrianza is not coming back or at least coming back soon. We need a good RH reliever to add to what we have. I also thinks this does not bode well for Camargo either.
I will admit that Sobotka and Weigel for Arcia is not an unfair trade.
The ASG is barely pertinent to the central focus of this site. The move to Cobb was the most seismic franchise event since the move from Milwaukee, and to not discuss it, including the politics involved, would have required pretending we were all idiots.
Personally, I can do without handholding. But if the purveyors of the site don’t want to moderate politics, so be it. Alternately, PgDn remains your friend at the ready.
I’m sort of in the Groucho Marx camp, in that I’m not sure I want any player whose team would be willing to let them go for nothing more than Weigel and Sobotka, but we certainly can always use more infield bench depth, so…
So … we got another Adriana? That’ll give the bench some punch.
The move to Cumberland was much more complicated and all-encompassing than this, and as such, it was much more difficult (if not impossible) to keep from at least gesturing toward local politics. But therein lies the difference: it was local politics, the suburban-vs.-urban dynamic, the Braves fanbase within the metro area, and all of that was wound together and was impossible to pull apart. Also, there were Braves fans on here, as I recall, who didn’t really have any knowledge of Atlanta politics and were genuinely curious about all the factors at play, and to explain it, it was impossible not to wade in at least a little bit.
It also didn’t mainline the prevailing 24-hour news network spin cycle of the day in the same way that this does. It’s also much easier to avoid the bear traps in that regard here than that situation was. Say it sucks that the All-Star Game isn’t gonna be here and you’re upset because your were planning on attending or whatever? Cool. But it’s not that hard to avoid wading into the voting rules of Georgia and Colorado, for instance. That has nothing inherently to do with the Braves. In fact, I could easily argue that the All-Star Game itself has nothing directly to do with the Braves. The number of people complaining about this who wouldn’t have so much as had anything to with All-Star weekend if it were here is, um…high (not necessarily referencing folks here so much as the fanbase at large…though if I wouldn’t have really given a crap about the All-Star Game even if it were in my team’s stadium, I can’t imagine I’m the only one here with that opinion).
So all that’s a long-winded way to say that the two situations aren’t really that similar. This situation features an exhibition baseball game that would’ve been played in our stadium, but it doesn’t really have much to do with the team otherwise. I don’t really think referencing it is as necessary as some folks are making it out to be. On the day where it happened, I could see some leeway, but it’s over and done with at this point.
I’m game for a side political thread if that’s what folks want, but I strongly believe the main baseball thread should stay no-politics.
If there’s nowhere on the site to discuss politics, and MLB goes the route of other major sports where politics will be infused in the sport at every turn, then you will have two things: the Mr. Bill’s that are outside the community and don’t care about the rules and constantly break it, and people like me constantly asking for clarification about where the line is. Sansho, I agree that the Cobb County move was seismic to the team, and this move last week was important to the team and seismic to the sport. What’s the difference? Parsing this becomes very difficult.
If you click a link that takes you to a political page, and you read political content that you disagree with, and that bothers you so much that even though you were warned of what you were about to read, you hate it so much that you want to go somewhere else, that’s your problem, and I pity you. Twitter is full of people who will throw a hissy fit if you say anything remotely disagreeable to them. No offense, Ryan, but you are friends on Twitter with some of the worst within the Braves. If you’re concerned about those people, then give a clear warning: don’t click this link if you can’t handle being around people who think differently than you. Hang out in your basement and turn off the internet. Tim Williams had a meltdown on me one day because I said that Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t a gang rapist. Never talked to the guy before in my life. Yeah, those people shouldn’t click the link.
I have read some wild comparisons on Twitter the last few days that’s for sure as part of #BravesTwitter and #fortheA.
Is Arcia Austin Riley flameout insurance or just random flotsam and jetsam bench guy in case Camargo is truly toast and Adrianza goes poof?
Arcia had options, and Braves used one. That is part of the reason for getting him.
@ 61, I do believe he is Adrianza insurance or maybe replacement. Also possible next year Camargo and Adrianza insurance / replacement.
Maybe Seitzer can help Arcia’s offense a tad. You never know for sure.
On the politics, just try not to go there. But I also suspect that Rob is right. MLB is fixing to play “woke” on issues that scare it or cause unrest with the players. And MLB’s consistency
of stance will be meaningless in any other context.
New thread.
https://bravesjournal.mystagingwebsite.com/2021/04/06/braves-at-nationals-april-7th/
The only comment I have on the “you got politics in my sports” discussion is that I call BS on the idea that there ever was a time when politics were “out” of sports.
Muhammad Ali’s career
1936 Olympics
Miracle on Ice
Curt Flood
Jackie Robinson’s career
1980 Olympics
Henry Aaron passing Babe Ruth
Texas Western 1966
MLB restart in NYC after 9/11
Joe Louis vs Max Schmeling
That is by no means an exhaustive list, but includes some of the biggest and most lauded Sports moments in the past century. All included a heavy dose of politics and cultural shifts. Sports happen in the real world. They are part of the culture, along with politics. To try to pretend they don’t mix is useless.