A Short Intro

In previous years I have prefaced my recaps with long, irrelevant, usually baseball-related stuff. But until the Braves show me they’re serious about playing baseball, I’m going to coast ,too.

Home Opener

At last the Braves return to Vinings, which was, when I was a kid, known as a suburb of Smyrna. Now it is the home to a real estate empire so large it has its own MLB team. Unlike the Dodgers, whose team looks like a Cooperstown intrasquad team, the rundown of the Marlins lineup included four guys I’ve never heard of. Matt Mervis? Be honest… what would you do with a Matt Mervis Topps card? Liam Hicks? (Organist Matthew Kaminski plays Oasis tunes as his intro. I might have gone with “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?”) Dane Myers? (His middle name is Michael; hence the picture above. Plus, our record is really scary.) At this point I think they’re just picking names out of the Alpharetta phone book. They started the year at the lowest payroll in baseball: $67 million, or less than the Dodgers will pay Ohtani 15 years from now. Of course, they are 4-3 and we are 0-7. (Three of those wins are against Pittsburgh, but we’re going to get to play them too.)

The pitching matchup was Shabbos Schwellenbach against Max (“Don’t call me Oscar”) Meyer. Max is probably the third-best pitcher named Max ever to play at Truist Park. Schwellenbach is trying to prove himself the best pitcher named Spencer. Eight innings pitched, two scratch singles yielded, 10 Ks, no walks.) We let Bummer pitch the 9th with a 10 run lead.

The Braves scored 10, which included 5 garbage-time runs in the 8th. Ozuna and Olson went back-to-back in the 7th to show that we can indeed get the ball out of the park, although Ozuna’s was an actual wall-scraper that required a replay.

Look: if we beat every team every game with a lower payroll than ours, we’re going to have over 100 wins even if we lose every game to a team with higher payroll. It doesn’t bode well for the playoffs, but I’ll take it for now. (I wrote that before I looked it up and saw that San Diego has a slightly lower payroll than we do. But beating up on the Marlins and Nats will be the key to getting back in this.)

It’s easy to make too much of this: Even AAAA teams ought to beat AAA teams silly. But the Marlins have beaten the Mets once and taken them to extra innings once. And they have Sandy Alcantara, who is more than slightly better than Max Meyer, and we’ll face him on Sunday. But there’s another point: if you tell me that we’ll have enough wins to make the playoffs despite the 0-7 start, then we can be ready to play the Dodgers and Padres later on — it’s a long time from now. Nobody will care that we looked overmatched in March. And if you go nuts over 0-7, you’re entitled to go nuts over 1-0 at home.

Brandon Gaudin

This is not his fault at all, but at least on my MLB.TV App (and it’s the same whether I use the Nvidia Shield App or the LG Built-in App) Brandon Gaudin announces every strikeout right about the time the ball crosses the plate, probably 100-200 microseconds before the batter has swung. I assume this comes from a very slight video delay relative to audio; you don’t really notice it on hits or in crowd noise. The thing that surprises me is that you don’t see it when the cameras cover the booth. I assume that they just sync better in that case. But it’s still really disconcerting to hear Brandon announce strikeout before the bat crosses the plate.

Brooklyn Tip-Tops

Ozuna has been walking cross-country. Braves announcers point out that his early-season total has been exceeded on three times, once by Benny Kauff in 1915. That once again covered that opening game for Harry Billiard in 1915. Benny walked twice in that game, but he got two singles off Billiard. I hope I’m now done dissecting that game.