It’s A Long Way To October

It was either Bill Parcells or Milli Vanilli who said “You are what your record says you are.” I had a boss once as a consultant who seriously proposed doing away with titles at the firm and just putting your rate per hour on your business card: that was all your clients were supposed to need to know. On Facebook, people constantly post some WAR comparison between two players and say: “Look how ridiculous this is!” even when the WAR comparison pretty much accurately reflects the relative value of the players. [The particular one in my feed today was this comparison between Joe Morgan and Miguel Cabrera. Yes. Miguel was the more talented offensive player, though the difference is not quite as stark between the raw numbers given the eras they played in (note OPS+) but it is easy to understand that the vastly different defensive skills of the two players, absent from the thumbnail, marks a Cabrera partisan in this debate as either someone who doesn’t understand baseball or has confused the Hall of Famer Joe Morgan with the former Red Sox manager with the same name.]

But WAR can be misleading*, Girl You Know It’s True might not be the best evidence as to the vocal artistry of Milli Vanilli, and even a record of 29-18 might not reliably tell you that a team will finish with 100 wins as the naive extrapolation would have it. There are many reasons for this: your team might have gotten lucky in the first 47 games and luck does not repeat, on average. You might have played a weak schedule, with tougher games coming later in the season.

And it’s not as if Braves fans, even those of very recent vintage, ought not be very cognizant of this. After all, just 3 years ago the Braves proved that a World Championship team could play sub-.500 ball into August. So why can’t a .500 team play 60% winning ball into June? Nothing is proven yet either way. It’s a long season…. try and enjoy it instead of worrying about it. I still think we can reach 100 wins. That would be an OK season, wouldn’t it?

The Game

So I got home at 7 PM and I missed the first inning-and-a-half. 6:40? Really? So we were already down 2-0, and I guess those runs are on me. Apparently, Nick Gonzalez got a two out single that knocked in the hollow carcass of Andrew McCutchen and Connor Joe, a guy I always thinks has had his first and last name transposed: I’m going to call him Connor, Joe.

The Bucs tacked on three more in the third on hits from the aformentioned Connor, Joe Edward Olivares and the desiccated husk of Yasmani Grandal. All five of these runs were against reliever-turned-starter Ray Kerr in 4 innings of work. If he continues to pitch like this, I’m going to call him Zack just to balance out a first name imbalance here at Braves Journal. He was replaced by starter-turned-reliever Darius Vines who gave up 6 in his 3 innings of work.

Meanwhile, the Braves treated Bailey Falter like he was John Candelaria. (C’mon y’all: how many good Pittsburgh Pirate left-handed starters can you name?) He had a shutout through 7 innings and until he _____ed in the 8th, giving up a three-run homer to Ronald Acuña, Jr. (Fill in the blank with the last name of any Pirate’s starter — I nominate Sterling Screwedup, but chose your own adventure here.) Another couple of meaningless runs scored and I was allowed to stop watching.

Pops

It will always be a somewhat controversial question: who was the worst manager in Atlanta Braves history? I’m going to go with Chuck Tanner, but I’m certainly open to argument. It’s not that Chuck had the worst record as a Braves manager: even not counting Ted Turner‘s 0-1, both Russ Nixon and Dave Bristol were clearly worse if you follow The Parcells Dictum. But there was something about Tanner that was just irritating, and I think his teams underachieved. But looking at Pittsburgh tonight in their City Connect uniforms reminded me that Chuck Tanner brought Willie Stargell to Atlanta as first base coach and, later, hitting coach to a raw rookie: Chipper Jones. Thanks, Pops. We Are Family.

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*Particularly in the short run. A quote from Bill James: [Some] conclude [from a WAR comparison] that the American’s League’s best player in 1966 was not Frank Robinson, who won the Triple Crown and was the unanimous MVP, but Earl Wilson, a pitcher whose ERA was not much better than the league average.   And the people who believe in WAR will look at that and say, “Oh, well, if that’s what the numbers show, that’s what they show,” rather than saying what they should say, which is “You know, that’s really a stupid thing to say.”