1991, 1973 and 2019
We don’t play the Twins very often. We are now 12-8 against Minnesota in the games played after the greatest World Series game ever: October 27th 1991. Unless you were born too late to understand what was going on, I think it’s hard to call yourself a Braves fan if you don’t remember where you were in October 1991 in general and on that date in particular. I’m not going to write about it – the memories are still a bit too raw, and the linked recap is quite good. But it says a lot to me that the Braves won a World Series on a 1-0 game and lost one on a 1-0 game, and the loss will stick with me far longer than the win. I have been thinking a little about the play a week earlier and wondering what replay today would have made of it. I suspect the call would not have been overturned, but Kent Hrbek can still rot in hell next to Jim Leyritz when they reach the end of their stay in this plane.
Tfloyd this week got me thinking about 1973. The offensive prowess of this team will naturally send one to thinking about the 1973 team that led MLB with 799 runs scored, a full 41 runs better than the eventual world series winners that year, the A’s. An 800 run season is not that great any more, of course, but it would still be pretty good. The defense, however? Well, they gave up 774 runs and finished 5th in a 6 team division, 22.5 games out of first.
The story that year was Hank Aaron, Darrell Evans and Davey Johnson all hitting over 40 homers. That record still stands, though it has been equalled twice in Colorado: in 1996 (Burks, Castilla, Galarraga) and 1997 (Castilla, Galarraga and Walker). The outlier in the Braves troika was Johnson, who hit 43 but never again managed to hit even 20. He is the only player in baseball history to have hit 40 in a season without another season hitting 20. Even Brady Anderson, who hit 50 in 1996, managed two seasons of 24 and 21 homers.
So where do the Braves stand now? Well, baseball seasons are long, but the Braves currently have 7 players on a 20+ homer pace, 4 on a 30+ homer pace, and one on a 50+ homer pace. But these would not be records, because the 2019 Twins (101-61) had 8 players hit 20 and 5 hit 30+ (including Eddie Rosario, who is on a 27 homer pace this year). But, because the playoffs are a crapshoot, they were swept by the Yankees in the first round, though they did hit 4 homers in those 3 games.
ASG
I’ve been writing recaps here for several years, and this is the obligatory time of year that I point out that I don’t want anyone from my team playing in the All Star Game; to be honest, I’d greatly prefer it if there was no All Star Game. But if there has to be one, I don’t want my players in it. I say it every year, and a few of you agree with me and a few disagree. Don’t care anymore, really, but I provide this paragraph for our new readers.
Minneapolis
“I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ballgames, but they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death. We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking white people here.”
Calvin Griffith, 1978
“Our review showed that MPD disproportionately stops Black and Native American people and employs different enforcement strategies in neighborhoods with different racial compositions. During stops involving Black and Native American people, MPD
DOJ Investigation, June 23, 2023
conducts searches and uses force more often than it does during stops involving white people engaged in similar behavior.”
If Kent Hrbek had behaved like a gentleman in 1991, I wouldn’t have had to write these two paragraphs. This is on him. But I also think the Randy Newman song Rednecks is a national treasure.
The Game
Tonight’s contest saw Clemson Tiger Spencer Strider versus Vanderbilt Commodore Sonny Gray whose given name, to my astonishment, is Sonny. He was named after his grandfather’s nickname. It’s a good thing, I guess, that his grandfather wasn’t known as Stinky. Or Petunia.
The Twins struck first when Only-Two-Outcomes Gallo blasted one to dead center. The Braves tied it up on a groundout by d’Arnaud scoring Riley in the 4th. At that point both pitchers dug in. Our boys really needed an extended start from Strider after the weekend’s XBox version of baseball. He gave them 7 strong innings with only the homer and two scratch singles.
The bottom of the seventh saw the tie broken on a Marcell Ozuna homer. A subsequent Michael Harris II infield single led to Emilio Pagan facing Ronald Acuna Jr. There’s nothing Gray could have thrown RAJ that could have had a worse result for him: 4-1.
At that point, you need two innings of semi-competent bullpen performance (ERA less than 13.5) to bank a win. Collin McHugh did his best to make it dicey, facing four batters and leaving men on second and third for Ben Heller to face. Heller got a lazy fly from Carlos Correa in what was probably the crucial at-bat of the game.
It was Kirby Yates for the save. It was good to see us beat the Twins with a guy named Kirby. It doesn’t erase this moment from 1991, not even close. But I’ll take it.
Frenchy Math
Gaudin: “Strider is throwing his changeup 7% of the time.”
Frenchy: “I’d like to see that almost double to 15%”
Well, if he’d actually gone to Clemson, they might have fixed that. Nah….
The runs scored & allowed totals for the 1973 team sent me to BRef, as scoring 25 runs more than you allow doesn’t seem normal for a team that finishes 5th in a 6-team division. The 5th-place finish is a little misleading, as their record of 76-85 seems a little better than that of most 5th-place teams, but the NL West was much stronger than the East that year (the Mets won the East with an 82-80 record). They also were the unluckiest team in MLB that year in Pythagorean terms, winning 7 games fewer than their runs scored & allowed would predict. The main culprit seems to have been a record of 16-30 in 1-run games, perhaps the result of a bullpen that BRef said had the worst wins above average (-7) of any MLB bullpen that year. They actually were 25-20 in blowouts (5+ run difference), which is usually a sign of a decent to good team.
One other thing I noticed that reminded me how much the game has changed: that team had 285 PA and 43.1 IP from players born outside the US. Paul Casanova and Maximino Leon accounted for most of the PA and IP, but old fourth(?)-string catcher Freddie Velazquez and pitcher Wenty Ford also played. I expect it’s been many years since a team has had so few PA and IP from foreign-born players.
5th may seem misleading, but 22.5 out doesn’t lie. As to the Pythagorean standings, it goes to explain why Eddie Mathews would get fired as manager in the middle of the next season. (Luck=Manager) I was a rising high school senior with wheels that summer, so I went to a lot of those games… the attendance of 800,000 for the year assured good seats at a very reasonable price, once you moved down: it was not great baseball, but it was a great time for personal freedom.
What a recap and what a memory. My then-girlfriend earned the right to become my wife when she appropriately named Kent Hrbek, “Big Oaf!” Glad we won this game and hope Elder can shove again tomorrow night. It is good to see Money Mike Harris II set the table for the top of the lineup, and it is so much fun to listen to the sound of the ball jumping off Ronald’s bat as he sends one into orbit.
And, the Mets lost again! 🙂
At the risk of angering the baseball gods, I think we can safely say the Mets are no longer a threat. Now, the Marlins, on the other hand . . .
I hope that Strider continues to utilize his changeup more frequently. It really does have the ability to make his fastball more effective. He looked great last night.
I wouldn’t be surprised if McHugh ends up going on a phantom IL stint soon. He just hasn’t been the guy we saw last season. His sweeper (to my eye, anyway) seems to have lost some of the bite and exaggerated horizontal movement that made it such a great pitch in the past. Hope he can figure things out.
“Unless you were born too late to understand what was going on, I think it’s hard to call yourself a Braves fan if you don’t remember where you were in October 1991 in general and on that date in particular.” I was in my first year of graduate school at the University of Tennessee, watching with an Arkansan couple (he was a classmate) in their apartment. The collective disbelief at how that game ended is still tangible to me. The next day, folks on campus were talking about the game, and I recall one guy saying, “Gene Larkin? Gene Larkin? Who the hell is Gene Larkin?!” I guess that’s what makes baseball so thrilling and excrutiating in equal measure: the chance that something so unlikely and unexpected could amount to an intervention in human history. (Gettin’ a little high-falutin’ in here . . . ) For my money, Lonnie’s blunder on the base path was the real WTF?! moment in that game.
Thanks for the excellent recap.
Thanks. AAR recently wrote about the collapse of Columbia baseball as an MLB feeder post-Gehrig. Larkin is one of their minor success stories (depending on how you count Sandy Koufax.)
I’m willing to be magnanimous and give ’em Sandy. Ryan Lavarnway and Craig Breslow aside, Yale baseball has been going to hell more or less since Jonathan Edwards was a freshman.
But I learned about Yale’s one bona fide Hall of Famer today, Orator Jim O’Rourke, who did much of his best work for the Boston Red Stockings! As his florid SABR biographer explains:
He got the first base hit in the National League and played into his fifties, as his Hall of Fame plaque notes. He also opposed the reserve clause and joined Monte Ward’s Players League, and formed a league of his own, running a team in Bridgeport with a black player long after the color line had been more or less established. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1945.
I’m a big fan of O’Rourke’s work with Sonic Youth.
Oh c’mon Alex. There’s also Ron Darling and the only winning pitcher on the 1961 Mets, Ken McKenzie, who would later coach the Elis. But I agree that Jonathan Edwards had a real problem, choosing to simply preach against the curveball as an instrument of the Devil rather than putting his time in learning to hit one.
I was in Hamburg, Germany studying and the only way to find out the game 7 score was buying the day after next day’s USA Today which had the box scores. Tough time to ba a Braves fan outside of the US and internet not really invented.
Looks like we are just going without a backup IF.
That’s just one way baseball has changed. If an infielder gets hurt, you are making some sort of emergency substitution for just a few innings… you can always replace them the next day. Once you get in the mode that your infielders are going to play every day (and whether that’s a good decision or not is a different matter) then your backups are just pinch hitters and runners who might as well be the best hitters you have…. subsequent defense be damned.
It’s similar to how NFL teams see a 3rd string QB. “If we get down to him, we’re screwed anyway, so might as well carry a player at another position that can contribute.”