Uncle Charlie takes the mound in the series finale with the with the San Francisco Giants. Following what Chris Sale did would be a good idea.
Sale’s six-inning outing last night was another thing of beauty and set the stage for some Fourth of July fireworks for Charlie Morton. Logan Webb (6-6, 3.12) toes the rubber for the Giants. First pitch is set for 7:20 Eastern/6:20 Central.
Old friend Jorge Soler and Matt Chapman has the most experience against Morton. Solar has a home run in 16 ABs (.188) and Chapman has three hits in 15 ABs (.200). Olson has the only HR against Webb in the lineup. It just might be a good pitching matchup tonight.
The most significant fireworks watch will be who Uncle Charlie plunks in the back foot with his breaking ball. My guess is Mike Yastrzemski, who is yours? I pick Mike because he bats left, may lead of the third, and I wanted to spell his last name. Drop your predictions in the game thread.
Enjoy the game and the fireworks wherever you find yourselves tonight. The only guarantee we have tonight is we won’t see this.
I don’t understand our lack of willingness to put guys on the IL..we constantly shorten our bench by letting guys work through things for 10 days at a time.
Good aggressive baserunning from kelenic! Love to see it; kind of sad Ozzie wasn’t able to take third.
Another Wall CS.
That first inning was a balm to the soul.
And then Forrest Wall got thrown out on a breaking ball, for heaven’s sake. He’s in Corky Miller territory for me.
Enough of Wall and Zack Short. You could pull people out of the crowd to do what they do. I love AA but seriously, upgrade these two please.
Wall isn’t much of a basestealer. Only 3 for 6 so far.
Charlie’s 2 seamer has been scoring much better than his 4 seamer this season, and he is using it more so far tonight.
Well, he hit young Yaz…
Great call, Christian!
Snitker’d. Damn.
That was an awful send. Team isn’t’ good enough to give away outs like that. It’s been like that all year. Just can’t get out of our own way.
I think the loss of Wash and EY was bigger than some expected
This team is so dumb on the basepaths.
Tuiasasopo forgot Olson runs like Bream.
Duvall and Murphy went down quickly so it might not have mattered.
The rate at which this team makes outs on the bases would make Chico’s Bail Bonds blush.
We don’t seem super fundamentally sound this year. Bad base running, curious approach at the plate, pitching away from our shift… just hasn’t seemed aligned all season.
I guess this qualifies as Hibernation Mode now.
And Short throws the ball away. I guess he was offended by my failure to hate him enough.
Short obviously has Lockhart’s pictures. Two of these 4 runs are kind of on him. The only thing he does for this team is take up a roster spot.
Coming into tonight, the 2nd highest OBP in the lineup was Riley’s mediocre .326.
We’ve talked a lot about the lack of power, but the on base skills have also been lacking. And I think this is where we really miss Acuña.
Someone posted on X that the Braves haven’t won a game that the other team scored more than 3 runs since April.
Nacho is having another big game at Gwinnett.
He can’t be less ready than some of these dudes, right?
This team needs a shot in the arm like Harris gave us a couple of years ago when he came up. I would try it.
As much as I’ve argued against it, pretty soon it’s going to go from inevitable to utterly impossible to do otherwise.
The problem is, it’s clear that Anthopoulos has been working the phones for at least a month, it’s clear that it’s a total seller’s market and everyone we’d want costs way than we’d want to pay, and we don’t have anyone other than Alvarez who’s remotely calluppable. Obviously, I want someone better, and it’s not clear that someone better is coming.
But I cannot stress this enough: Nacho is not an offensive differencemaker. He hit five home runs in his one year of college; his minor league ISO is barely over .100, and that’s including his otherworldly Triple-A performance (which is aided by a .379 BABIP).
He could very possibly be a first-division starting shortstop, and I think it’s quite possible that he could be the player that Orlando Arcia was last year, even if it takes him a couple years to find his footing. But he will not be the player that Dansby was; he cannot be the kind of gamechanger that Harris and Strider were; in a half-season, he cannot add more than a win or so, and that’s very much the best-case scenario. Those guys were five-tool prospects, and he’s just not.
(The best-case scenario would be something like Martin Prado, where a high-contact grit guy with off-the-charts makeup comes up, never stops hitting, and just does much better than anyone ever dreamed. Lord knows I’m rooting for that to happen. But it’s unbelievably rare. The odds are a lot better that he winds up with something like Omar Infante’s career.)
The odds are equally decent that he comes up and struggles in the majors just as mightily as Hurston Waldrep did, and Waldrep had a much higher track record of success at a much greater level, facing much better college competition.
Maybe Nacho can be a kind of emotional sparkplug, helping our moribund offense to rediscover its mojo. But barring a Jose Ramirez-level miracle, his onfield performance won’t do much to move the needle.
Arcia was actually a legitimate prospect once, ranked as high as 8th in all MLB by Baseball America. Nacho has never been ranked that high and it’s probably not fair to even project him to match Arcia’s best season.
That said, you have to try at this point. Someone who can put the ball in the play and not strike out a ton has value within the context of this lineup. The most likely outcome is that he can’t handle MLB pitching and his defense isn’t good enough.
None of this matters as long as our best hitters keep struggling. Riley, Ozzie, Olson, and Murphy are basically at the 20th percentile ZIPS projection (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2024-zips-projections-atlanta-braves/). The only players really overperforming are Kelenic and Travis.
WRC+
Austin Riley 114
Ozzie Albies 100
Matt Olson 108
Sean Murphy 93
And Marcell, obviously, though he’s gone from white-hot to tepid.
The Braves are dead in the water right now. In clutch situations there are zero expectations that the Braves can rise to the occasion.
Good catch, I don’t know how I forgot Ozuna.
and her comes Eddie on a minor league contract. I guess I need to be careful what I wished for…lol
Arcia is back in the lineup tonight. Eli White is also in the lineup with Wall back at Triple A.