Come Sail Away, Come Sale Away With me. I had a clever piece in my mind following yesterday’s win over Pittsburgh.
Chris Sale was once again brilliant, twirling seven innings of one-run ball. Great! But the news of the day didn’t occur to last evening, when it was reported that Ronald Acuña Jr. suffered a full tear of his ACL and is gone for the season.
Like our friends, Styx,
“I’m sailing away. Set an open course for the Virgin Sea. ‘Cause I’ve got to be free, free to face the life that’s ahead of me”
Styx
without Ronnie, in what has been an excruciatingly painful season to this point. Come Sail away with me!
“We lived happily forever, so the story goes. But somehow we missed out on the pot of gold. But we’ll try, bet that we can, to carry on!” Maybe the clubhouse will have Styx on repeat today. Ronnie’s tweet was enough to get the roughest among us choked up.
We’ve played this tune before. We’ve sung this song and danced this dance. Ronnie went down in 2021, and the Braves went on that roll that earned them the World Series title.
Come Sale Away With Me
Because we’ve sung this song before, and we have the best executive in all of professional sports. We don’t have to lose hope. We can, I get it. No Spencer Strider. No Acuña. Sean Murphy has missed the first 50 games of the season. No Austin Riley for the past two weeks. And, really no offense but Marcell OHzuna and Travis d’Arnaud for most of 2024 and doom and gloom could win out.
But Chris Sale, man! Come Sail Away, Come Sale Away With Me! The dude just keeps slinging it. Seven innings. Four hits, one walk, and eight K’s. One run allowed. That’s one run in 27 innings.Bro! The Braves have been on the verge of being swept three times this season. Each time, the veteran acquisition stopped the bleeding and picked up a win. He is 8-1, has a 2.12 ERA, and should be the Cy Young front-runner. Come Sale Away With Me!
Oh, and the offense hit the ball yesterday, except for OHzuna. Matt Olson had three hits, including one that bounced into the river and a mother than banged off the right-field wall. And Jarred Kelenic had three hits in four ABs in Acuña’s spot.
The boys return home for an afternoon game with the Gnats today, “So climb aboard. We’ll search for tomorrow on every shore. And I’ll try, oh Lord, I’ll try to carry on!
Transaction a Day AA
This one is not fun to type…
Joey Wendle gets the ax and J.P. Martinez gets the call to the bigs. However, Brian Snitker has already stated that Jarred Kelenic and Adam Duvall will be everyday starters, so J.P. is in it for the butt splinters. Ronald Acuna Jr.has now had surgery on both knees and it’s really hard not to dwell on the fact that he might never be the same player again.
Braves Lineup
I hope they win.
Love your positive spirit, Christian. Agree, let’s relive 2021. Because why not? Even without RAJ, this is a good team and you just KNOW, AA will do his magic at the deadline. I mean, we have several great looking pitching prospects in the minors. We won’t need all four next year… Well, maybe we do but let’s go. Braves in 2024!
Riley and Murphy are back in the lineup today!
Really nice of Morton to throw Eddie a middle middle fastball up 0-2. What a terrible job of pitch selection
JC’d. More second guessing:
Why did we make six different transactions to end up with a LF who is league average with no power? Why didn’t we just sign Joc or someone with a higher floor?
Speaking of Joc, why did we sign Eddie over Joc after the title?
Why did we trade Contreras and our remaining prospect depth for Murphy?
Why didn’t we just give Freeman the extra year?
We exhausted our farm system with marginal or no upgrade in production at 1B and C. Now finding a replacement for Acuna will be difficult because we need the pitching prospects to replace Fried and Morton next year.
Careful–you’re not allowed to suggest AA isn’t a genius mastermind. He’s playing 4D chess here. Actually, he is the best GM we’ve ever had, but the Freddie blunder and Murphy blunders are exactly what put us in a difficult spot, unable to maximize our contention window. They were unforced errors. To be fair, it’s possible there are details to the Freddie debacle that we’re unaware of, but it sure looked like he could’ve paid the man something reasonable (Eddie Rosario’s money plus Olson’s) and used the prospects for elusive pitching.
Since I was doom-and-gloom yesterday, I’ll respond to a couple of these, and to something Rob asked in the last thread:
• Rob, I actually don’t think Spencer is throwing max effort on every pitch. You’ll notice he hardly ever hits 100 any more. His average FB velo was about a mile slower in 2023 than in 2022. I think that was at least partly intentional, as he tried to stretch out his stamina by taking a little off his fastball. We saw a lot more 96-mph fastballs from him than we ever saw in his rookie campaign.
• Why did we sign Eddie over Joc? My glib answer is “money,” but I’m also guessing that Joc’s extra-ness could have been a little much, too. He had a great year in 2022 and is off to a great start this year, but he’s also been replacement-level quite a bit in his career (including during his time for us) due to his being a statue in the field, and I think it was fair to assume that there wasn’t likely to be a huge difference between them. Eddie out-WARed Joc in 2023, for example.
• Why did we one-red-paperclip our way to trading for Kelenic? Because Kelenic is not far removed from being one of the top three prospects in baseball and we acquired him for not very much. It’s fair to argue that AA didn’t do enough, but the deal for Kelenic itself still looks eminently reasonable. (We got him for Jackson Kowar, who went down for season-ending arm surgery in spring training, shortly after the trade. We got Kowar for Kyle Wright, who was ALREADY out following a season-ending shoulder surgery. I wish both the best, but neither of them was likely to do much for the team.)
• The Murphy and Olson trades may indeed have been too cute by half – the Olson trade, in particular – but both trades allowed Anthopoulos to acquire a young All-Star – each one of the best players at his position in the game – and then tender a contract that would keep him on the team for the better part of a decade. The Braves clearly did not have confidence that Contreras would become the player he has become in Milwaukee, which is a shame for us but a lot of credit needs to be given to the Brewers for helping him reach a new level in his game.
That said, I saw Contreras as a potential “franchise cornerstone” and frequently argued against the prospects for a Contreras trade at the time, here and here.
With respect to the Freeman and Swanson negotiations, I’m not happy that we got to a place where were were both unwilling to pay market price and we had no prospect from our own farm system ready to take over; for Olson, we had to trade a lot of our best prospects, and for Swanson, we had to pretend that either Grissom was capable of playing ML-quality defense or Shewmake was capable of ML-quality offense; we lucked out that Arcia was capable of being league-average, even if he’s clearly no better than that.
The challenge remains the lack of impact prospects, but, to be honest, that was true even before the Olson trade.
But all of the metrics said that Contreras was on this trajectory. He was an incredibly precocious hitter with a high walk rate and oppo power and his defensive metrics said he was a very solid catcher. He was also unfathomably cheap. The defense of this trade has always been “but the Braves thought,” as if no mere fan could question them. Well, this real-world outcome calls into question their hunches. It was a disastrous trade. A lot of people (includine me) said so at the time but were told to pipe down and let the adults do the thinking.
I agree that the Brewers’ coaching staff deserves a lot of credit in helping Contreras shore up his defense. They’ve taken numerous catchers over the years – Yasmani Grandal, Omar Narvaez, Manny Pina, and others – and developed them into elite defenders, particularly when it comes to pitch framing. It’s a veritable catching factory over there.
During his time with the Braves, Contreras never ranked higher than the 22nd percentile in pitch framing, and also graded out rather poorly in other defensive metrics like blocks above average and pop time. I’m wondering if the Braves just didn’t feel like they could develop him into a solid defender (particularly with framing), since they have at times acquired guys who are already good at it (Tyler Flowers, Jeff Mathis, etc.).
Murphy, on the other hand, was already a great defender and had the raw power and tools needed to successfully adopt the Braves’ hitting philosophy (i.e., swinging hard, sacrificing whiffs in the zone for good contact whenever contact is actually made, etc.), which he did to a large degree last year (higher xwOBA, xSLG, and barrel rate than Contreras).
I certainly wouldn’t argue that this trade was a slam dunk, as Contreras was more valuable than Murphy last year and Sean’s missed most of the season so far due to injury. However, the difference in value last year (5.7 fWAR vs. 4.9 fWAR) isn’t huge. I also think that, going forward, Murphy is not going to be as bad as he was after the ASB break last year.
Man, Charlie pissed me off. What a terrible 0-2 pitch to Eddie and now a four-pitch walk to Ruiz.
When you get Eddie Rosario to an 0-2 count, you HAVE to throw him a fastball right down the dick. /s
Morton doesn’t seem to be very good when he only gets 4 days rest.
The umpire missed a clear strike 3 call on a checked swing and Morton should have been out of the inning with only 2 runs allowed then Senzel immediately hits a 2 run double.
Morton might indeed be finished….yep
Absolutely terrible. 0-2 to Abrams makes is 5-0 and I may have to walk away.
I watch almost every inning of every game when I’m not blacked out by MLB, but it’s getting tougher to do!
Patronize the sponsors, walk the dog. Charlie ain’t fooling anyone.
Every now and then Charlie has an outing like this. Even when he pitches well, he often has episodes where all of a sudden he can’t put the ball where h wants. That’s why he’s not an ace or even a number 2 or 3 starter. Even so, he’s a very good number 4 starter.
Still, I’d feel better if AA acquires a solid starter before the deadline and Charlie becomes our number 5. Of course since yesterday an outfielder is more important than a new starter
Thanks for the recap, Christian. I agree it’s getting harder and harder to watch. And that’s mainly because of theories offense. Last year even when the starter messed the bed, you could stay tuned to watch for the comeback. Feels about hopeless this year.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting we’re DOOOMED, just that it’s hard to watch right now.
To be honest, it’s not just hard to watch. It’s actually impossible for me this weekend, as we are visiting my brother in law who lives in a Bally sports desert. Given what’s been going on on the field, I’m not complaining about that as much as I would have.
capped, as in a hood from Anacostia put a cap in us.