Yes, the “currently observed” (we can’t observe many things except on Mondays) holiday for “Patriots Day” was yesterday. 250 years since a semi organized citizen rabble slapped the greatest colonial empire in the world square in the face. Also, about 180 years since their descendants changed “rounders” into baseball.
The other connection to that tale relevant to last night goes to Longfellow’s poem of commemoration. “Hardly a man now alive” remembers a string of good Braves baseball. We are on a streak that is the first 2 game winning streak of the year, that has now stretched to 4 consecutive wins. Obviously, it is an exaggeration. Kind of like when Richard Pryor said of Mudbones, “He used to sit at the barbecue pit and spit. That were his job. At least, I think that were his job, because that was all he ever did.” However, this streak is going against 2 mid level powers who seemed to have slipped past their glory days. Keep it going, and continue it against good competition, and then maybe the anxiety will lessen.
It certainly seems fortunate that Spencer Schwellenbach is with the Braves. Another good performance. 7 innings, 92 pitches, 67 strikes, 5 K’s, no BB’s, 8 hits (not so good) and 3 runs, 2 “earned.” First scoring was in the second and for the St. Louis squad. Schwelly got to 2 outs and then Nolan Gorman doubled. Pedro Pages singled, and Matt Olson threw a relay away to allow Pages to end up on 3rd. Then, an infield single (aided by the standard anti lefty shift) from Victor Scott got the run home. Without the error, that probably ends the inning with an out at second.
In the 3rd, the Braves tied it up. Alex Verdugo led off with a walk and Austin Riley unloaded on one for 400 feet. It stayed 2 to 2 until the top of 6, when the Cardinals (those not in conclave), got one back.
When Phil Maton came in to start the 8th for the Redbirds, things went, as Hoyt would say “Not too good.” He did get Alex Verdugo to strike out. Then, Austin Riley was called out at first on a “bang bang” grounder. But, (unusually for most of the history of replay) the play was reversed. Then Marcel Ozuna walked (and Eli White came in to run). Olson singled to tie it. Then Ozzie Albies walked to load them up, and Michael Harris, II hit a sacrifice fly to get a lead. And here is where the Braves stayed on the pedal, or else this W would have been an L. Next that despicably awful catcher, Sean Murphy, hit an Earl Weaver special for “elbow room.” Now Braves 7, Cardinals 3.
The “elbow room” was much needed because Raisel Iglesias was getting lit up. Two doubles and a home run and the Cardinals got to 6. Then, a walk, but then a ground out, catcher to first. Whew!
Agreed, Cliff, this isn’t great competition, but I’ll take it.
JC’ed from last thread:
Small sample, but the Braves are 6th in hitting fWAR in the last 10 days. 12th in runs scored. So they’re not completely lost at this point. Obviously getting out of the West coast against the best teams in baseball helps that.
Another thing too: of the current lineup, 6 guys now have OPS+ above 100. If you could find a way to get Baldwin into the lineup, you’d have 7. Obviously Harris and Kelenic are dragging down the lineup. Allen is obviously not a good hitter, but he now has 4 SBs with no CS, he’s playing great defense, so he’s now worth 0.4 bWAR and 0.3 fWAR. As long as his offense doesn’t fall off a cliff, he’s simply more valuable and helpful than Arcia.
Who starts tonight? Uncle Jesse? Waldrep and AJSS aren’t fully rested.
Pretty incredible how a team that wins looks like a much better team than a team that loses. JonathanF, can you check my math on that one?
Bill James once wrote a 6-book series on this phenomenon. His conclusion: yes, they do look better.
Looks is a function of wins with near-infinte weight on the recent games and descending weight as you travel into the distant past of, say, last week. Also, as tfloyd pointed out, since baseball doesn’t really start until April, (and frankly April Fools Day can’t really count either) the Braves are now a solid 8-7. Nothing to worry about at all unless for some reason they count those first 6.
RE: Kelenic/Acuna
Snitker can’t say the quiet part out loud: his expectations are higher for Acuna and less for Kelenic. There was a lesson to teach Acuna and there wasn’t a lesson to teach Kelenic. I’m over it and I think the news cycle will be over it soon.
And I don’t like Acuna tweeting about it, but who cares? We let Freddie and Dansby go and replaced Markakis with no one like him. This team has no player leadership, so these things will happen.
Agreed…I think beyond the lack of player leadership is also (once again) the loss of Wash. There is no conceivable world where Snitker would have been able to “not see” the play that Kelenic got thrown out on if Wash was still there. I also don’t buy it that Snit didn’t see it between when it happened and when Kelenic went in to apologize for it, but I also don’t matter, so…
The news cycle is moving on because the team has won a few games in a row, and winning will clear the air in any clubhouse. But questions have been raised about Snit’s leadership and we’ve all got a few more doubts than we did a couple of years ago, and that’s just not going away.
It’s really great that Verdugo has looked good in his first week with the team. Less noted is that the other people Alex Anthopoulos targeted in his flurry of minor league contracts have mostly flopped – Enyel De Los Santos has been okay, but Jesse Chavez has already gotten released once, and so have Angel Perdomo and Buck Farmer and, Lord help us, Hector Neris. So has Jose Suarez, who we got for Chavez, for that matter. It wouldn’t matter if we had good depth in our 40-man roster and these guys were signed as org players to fill out the Triple-A roster, but we don’t and we still don’t have enough cannon fodder for the Gwinnett shuttle.
The Rafael Montero trade was a good example of exactly what I want to see: spending hard money on a guy who is, at the very least, major league caliber, and with some potential of being pretty good. We’ll see what Scott Blewett can give us.
Alex Anthopoulos continues to be pretty active in picking up minor league free agents and trading flotsam for jetsam, but the 40-man roster is still riddled with holes, and we’re not out of the water yet.
I’m sure if AA could take on more salary dumps like Montero, he would. But who’s dumping salary this early in the year? He probably thought he was getting Tanner Scott, Yates, Robertson, etc., struck out on everybody, and now he’s sitting here holding all this money he can’t spend. In some ways, I sympathize. But not many ways.
RE: Bench coaches
If this isn’t a public message for the bench coaches to step up, I don’t know what is. Where are Walt Weiss and Tom Goodwin, two guys who played plenty hard in their careers? Ron Washington is not the only guy that can be a bad cop on behalf of the coaching staff. If I’m Tom Goodwin, I’m probably thinking, “Yeah, I know I’m the new guy, but if they aren’t going to speak up, I will.”
That was quite a fortunate way to bring the 9th inning chaos to a close last night. The Cards have seemingly always had some extra “mojo” when playing the Braves. Good to get the 1st game of the series.
My sources tell me that the Braves will throw an announcer game tonight: Glavine, Byrd, Nitkowski, O’Day and Moylan. If they get in trouble… Jeffy.
The Cardinals plan to counter with Bob Gibson who, although dead, is in much better shape.
Stop the presses!
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/04/braves-select-nathan-wiles.html
Underrated name for a crafty journeyman pitcher
Wiles went to Oklahoma, so they may have to drop Joe’s mike a few decibels.
As if there wasn’t enough people involved in this situation that looked bad, Jeffy had to join them:
https://x.com/ATLHeadband/status/1914687383376715830
I mean, he’s not wrong about most of this, but at the end where he seems to suggest that Acuna is really replaceable, that’s way too far. I agree that Acuna shouldn’t have tweeted that, but Frenchy gets a little too close to saying Acuna is a bad teammate.
Jeff’s way out of line here. He’s trying to contrast “26 guys in that locker room that are busting their ass every single day” with Acuña – but that defense rings awfully hollow given that we’re talking about a guy who literally failed to bust his butt down the line and got thrown out at second base in a tie game.
I don’t agree with him calling out Acuña for “burying” his teammate, given that Kelenic’s a guy who was about this close to losing his job to Stewart Fairchild. When he got himself thrown out at second, every single one of us had a pretty similar reaction: there goes that talented prospect bust, screwing up and costing the team again.
He can spare me the crocodile tears at Kelenic in the manager’s office on Easter Sunday. He had a game that day and he had to go to work, and if he was any better at his job, he wouldn’t have needed to be in the boss’s office with his hat in his hand.
And I absolutely don’t agree with Jeff’s nasty insinuation that Acuña called Snitker racist. There was absolutely nothing in the tweet that came within a mile of that, and Ken Rosenthal’s column and podcast specifically considers and rejects that notion unreservedly.
(Rosenthal notes that there was a double standard applied, which – of course there was. No one would disagree, except Francoeur, who goes out of his way to complain about how many times Acuña flouted the rule.)
Acuña is an extraordinarily gifted player and he has a couple of flaws: he occasionally pops off when he shouldn’t, and he occasionally doesn’t hustle down the line when he should, and it sounds an awful lot like Jeff has some longer-term deep-seated frustration with the guy, and in my opinion, it comes off as awfully ugly. If I were Acuña, and I knew that guys like Francoeur around the team feel that level of frustration with me, it’d make me feel uncomfortable.
Considering that Jeff himself was a talented prospect bust who couldn’t carry Acuña’s jockstrap, I could understand if he identifies with Kelenic, who shares a whole lot of his flaws at the plate, and if he feels some jealousy at Acuña’s talent, but that four-minute rant is about the last thing I ever need to hear Jeff weigh in on about anything.
(Should Ronald have weighed in? Of course not. Was he right about the point he made? Yeah.)
Francoeur should know better than to go on a radio show and put a flamethrower on top of gasoline. And he brought up racism? WTF
Can we let this whole situation go away already?
Acuna didn’t say he was racist, but a lot of people on social media platforms took it that way, because they are itching to take every disparate treatment incident that way and react with self-righteous indignation, and all that skews the impression of what Acuna actually said. I saw lots of “double standard for Latin American players” comments. The double standard is mostly hot dog superstar vs pathetic headcase if there is one, but that’s only my opinion. More likely, it’s an aloof Snitker who is not the same guy in the dugout he was 5 years ago. I wish everyone, especially Frenchy, would stop inveighing about what is more of a sad incident than a controversy. I think it does spell the end for Snitker, not because he had a lapse, but because the lapse was the most visible example of what we’d all seen more globally.
Nathan Wiles is up to be the bulk guy today. He’s been good in a small sample so far this season, but over the rest of his career he’s not been so good. Maybe the curse of the first look will help against the Cardinals.
I would assume Wiles is only up to make a couple of long appearances before AJSS is eligible to return. (Or if Strider is ready after the 12 days are up.
This story has run its course.
<< Jeff Francouer: Hold my OBP.
There is someone who absolutely needs to issue a public statement now — especially because there isn’t a real owner, and he’s the highest, most visible person around:
Anthopoulos.
Where the hell is he?
This club looks like it has its head in the sand or up its ass, and somebody needs to be a damned adult, step in and restore some order, because the manager is addled and incapable of doing so — and a huge part of the problem, anyway. He, too, needs to be put in timeout.
I still think it’s better for this all to be out in the open. It forces it to be handled rather than letting it silently fester all season. Acuna might suck as a teammate, might be great, might be both on any given day. I don’t care one bit if they all hang out together or not. Just play hard and play smart. The Braves have been the boring-est of boring orgs for decades. I wouldn’t mind a little bit of old-school A’s or Yankees chaos, if the outcomes are similar.
So the team that has now won 4 in a row is in disorder? Are the players protesting? A statement needs to be made for what reason? to appease who? let the team play baseball and stop inserting ourselves into this. Even if a mistake was made who cares, we all make them.
Move on
Snitker blew it trying to stretch Blewett for a 3rd inning.
He’s so bad at this. You’d think he’d understand the concept that an “opener” generally doesn’t go through the order a second time.
But if he couldn’t keep track of what was going on in an at-bat, how could he be expected to properly manage a bullpen game?
Just fire this guy into the sun, please.
To Snitker, a starter goes 5. Doesn’t matter if he’s never pitched more than 2
I know some of you love Ozzie, but geez…he lost that at bat by swinging at the first pitch out of the strike zone after back to back walks. Zero zone discipline and it rears its head way often.
If Snit is going to punt this game by letting Blewett just eat innings, please take Riley, Olson and Harris out so they don’t get hurt in a game we don’t appear to be trying to win. Blewett was out of gas last inning so it makes sense to leave him out there.
Yeah that was frustrating. Pallante had no idea where the ball was going and Ozzie went up there and swung at the first pitch out of the zone.
Reminds me of game 1 vs the Brewers in the NLDS when Soler and Freddie had locked in and worked gritty walks. Then Albies comes up and LEROOOOOY JEEEENKINS.
Doogie Howser, LF has been a big improvement to our outfield.
Problem with a bullpen game is eventually one of them might not have it. To this point, Montero doesn’t.
Arcia and Ozzie might have the worst range of any ss/2b combo in baseball. They move like a beer league softball team.
I fear that not scoring in that inning is going to come back to roost.
Welp.
7 walks will eventually come back to bite.
Snit with a top notch challenge of an obvious safe call.
He is either trying to get fired or just wanted to show he was finally awake in the 8th inning.
Why did Atlanta challenge the call at the plate? It was obviously not even close. Hopefully losing their challenge will not hurt them, but whoever is reviewing and recommended a challenges must be smoking something.
It’s on the principle of you’d rather lose your challenge than end the game not having used it.
Yech. What a game.
Bryce Elder going Wednesday, quality Diamondbacks team starting Friday. But the bigger issue is still the dereliction of leadership.
Maybe the Elder game will get rained out.
Schwelly and Sale then pray for hail
ONIO- True story…
B14- We can only hope
Recapped.