Return to College Football
Yeah, yeah, there’s a pennant race, and calling it a whole new season is a bit of a cliché, But I wasn’t talking about baseball. While the rest of you root for college football teams that have played three games already, my Yale Bulldogs, owing to a particularly daft Ivy League rule limiting the length of football seasons, start their 2024 campaign tomorrow in Worcester, MA against the Crusaders of the College of the Holy Cross. For those keeping score at home, they’re going for their third straight Ivy title. Hunker down you hairy dogs,
Return to Oz
“Return to Oz” is a movie I haven’t seen. It is described on Wikipedia as a “dark fantasy film.” In it, Dorothy apparently returns and finds that “the yellow brick road is now a pile of rubble, and the Emerald City is in ruins.” Sounds familiar. I’m not sure this season needs any more dark fantasies, but it is nice to get Ozzie back, and we’ll see how it goes. Expecting anything is a mug’s game.
Return to Kranitz
Rick is back as pitching coach. We know so little about what pitching coaches actually accomplish and how they do it that his extended absence is probably 15th on the list of things that went wrong with this year’s season. Apparently, Kranitz was in regular contact witht the Braves in any case. Disney never made a movie called “Return to Kranitz,”
The Game: Return to Bellozo
Yesterday, the Dodgers hung 20 on the Fish in Miami. (For those of you who don’t know, “hanging 20” is an arcane move in tandem surfing.) But as most of you, there are few things more relevant in baseball than “yesterday.” As the only famous author ever to die while crossing Peachtree Street once wrote: “Fiddle-dee-dee. Tomorrow is another day.”
The Braves last faced Valente Bellozo on August 2nd. I had the recap for that game and was pleased that I came up with three separate impressions of his name:
- an Italian scooter model with a governor that ensures its top speed is 91 mph;
- a small Tuscan winery producing an acceptable Rosso di Montalcino; and my favorite
- a small-circulation magazine out of Turin that specializes in photographs of beautiful women in clown outfits
For all my self-described cleverness, my punishment is to be assigned another start by Valente Bellozo and have to come up with new impressions. I’m not going to do it. The soft-tossing Mexican righty with the Italian name once again
Charlie Morton, apparently feeling that a team that gave up 20 the night before needed a bit of a handicap gave up three in the first inning. I want to put asterisks around those three runs, however, and engage in a mini-rant. The critical blow was a ground rule double to right that an actual right fielder would have fielded. I understand that the Braves are beggars here, but the Jorge Soler Redux Experience has been a major disappointment: the question was whether he could make up with his bat what were bound to be inadequacies in the field. The answer is a resounding NO. (Did that resound enough enough? If not, say NO really loudly right now, so much so that you bother the dog. That’s what I just did.) BRef shows Jorge in Atlanta with a 1.0 oWAR and a -1.1 dWAR. I think they understate his truly miserable performance in right field, but that’s certainly the right order of magnitude. And he’s ours for next two season, with no position to play, at $16 mil per annum. In AA I trust, but there seem to be a limited number of lightning strikes in any one bottle, as Eddie Rosario also demonstrated, and Adam Duvall, and Luke Jackson To be fair, the Ramon Laureano experiment has gone pretty well, even though BRef doesn’t much care for his defense either. (Neither do I, but it’s better than Soler’s, and the Braves are paying him the minimum.)
And NO! a bases-loaded sac fly by Soler did not come close to making up for his right field lapse. A subsequent dinger by Orlando Arcia (the Braves’ 200th of the season) brought it back to 3-2 in the top of the fourth. A wild pitch made it 4-2 in the bottom of the fifth, but Laureano got that run back with a homer in thoe top of the 6th. Yet another Soler failure with the tying run on second ended the top of the 7th. (NO! Keep saying it and the dog will eventually make allowances for your eccentricities as long as you keep feeding her.)
The Braves mounted attacks in almost every inning, but the eight inning was typical. Laureano reaches on an error and a strikeout/caught stealing stanches the threat.
With the Phillies with a comfortable lead in Queens, a good 9th inning could accomplish something. They faced Jesus Tinoco, a Chritstian-based Venezuelan oil company. He got Arcia, Michael Harris II and faced Ozzie with the Braves’ last hope. Click your heels three times and hope for better tomorrow afternoon.
Every day spent -2 off the last WC spot is crushing right now. They’ve gotta get to at least -1 before Monday.
Why is Ozzie batting 2nd vs RHP?
Matt!!
Brandon Gaudin’s cockblocking reference redeems the entire announcing season.
Missed it – what’d he say?
Pierce Johnson complained that the on-deck guy for the Marlins was standing in front of the pitch clock so that Pierce couldn’t see it. CJ then says, innocently: “Oh, so he’s a clock blocker” but he stumbled over it a bit so then he tried to redeem himself by saying “as opposed to a shot blocker.” whereupon Gaudin says: “Or when you’re strolling down Brickell in Miami with two or three of your male friends.”
I think we might have to win the rest of these games. If we don’t then fine. I for real don’t see how this lineup ever wins. But my money and my fandom can’t quit these guys. Here’s to a last week of shenanigans.