The Braves lost again tonight, 5-4, meaning they were just swept at home by the Brewers. It’s the kind of performance we’ve come to expect in this miserable and frustrating season.
Spencer Strider gave up all five runs on 11 hits in 4 2/3. The pen held them from there, giving the team a chance to overcome an early 5-1 deficit. And come back they did, but, since this is 2025, they came up one run short. Michael Harris homered in the ninth to cut it to 5-4, but it was too little too late.
For me, this time of year is especially frustrating, knowing beyond all doubt that there will be no October baseball for our Braves. I’ve become spoiled over the past 35 seasons. In the Braves’ first 25 seasons in Atlanta, they only made the playoffs twice, and in most of the other seasons they entered August with little or no chance of October baseball. Since 1991, our guys have been in the postseason 25 times.
I realize that I’ve come to take October baseball for granted. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, I always enjoyed the postseason, even without the presence of my favorite team. It’s harder for me now to enjoy October when the Braves aren’t one of the teams.
The Braves trip to Bristol this past weekend was partly a celebration of the heritage of American country music. Few country music stars were as talented as Merle Haggard. The Hag wrote many great songs; Mama Tried, Silver Wings, and Sing Me Back Home are some of my favorites. He also wrote one of the great Christmas songs, If We Make it Through December, about finding hope in a very difficult time. I’m turning to Merle to help me find that spirit of hope.
If we make it through October
Everything’s gonna be all right, I know
It’s the hardest time of the season
When our team sits with nowhere to go
We got an awful lot of injuries
And their timing’s not the greatest in the world
Heaven knows we had high hopes
Wanted October to be right for all the fans
I don’t mean to hate October
It’s meant to be the happy time of year
But it’s miserable to watch those other teams
When our team gives us nothing to cheer
If we make it through October
Everything’s gonna be all right, I know
It’s the hardest time of the season
When our team sits with nowhere to go
If we make it through October
Got plans to be in a better place next summer time
Maybe even back in contention
If we make it through October, we’ll be fine
I’d like to be the kind of fan who finds the small joys and delights in each game, even when you are nearly 20 games out in August. But “Wait till next year” is also a time-honored way for baseball fans to hang on in the dark times. That’s about all I have for now.
Mad applause!
It may be all you have, but it’s a lot. Thanks.
Tremendous.
Fine work. Haggard might even approve. 😉
BTW, “The warden led a prisoner down the hallway to his doom…” is one of the great first lines of a song ever.
Gonna be a tough October for sure… but, 23 days ’til SEC football.
Enough time has passed in Shea Langeliers’ career to now take yet another look at the Freddie Freeman/Matt Olson situation. Langeliers has 2.8 fWAR so far, so he’ll probably get to 4 fWAR this year. Freddie Freeman has 2.4 fWAR for the year. So since you traded Langeliers to get Olson because you lost Freddie, then Langeliers and Freddie are linked. So this year, Langeliers/Freeman have produced 5.2 fWAR and will probably end up around 7 fWAR. Obviously the issue of all of this was over whether they wanted to give Freddie the 6th year. Freddie seems to now finally be in some sort of decline: 7.7 fWAR in 2023, 3.9 fWAR in 2024, 2.4 fWAR so far in 2025. He has 2 more years on his contract after this year, so this might be the peak of how bad that deal is going to look, but it may look a little better as Freddie continues his decline and if Olson can avoid a significant decline.
But since you also needed a good defensive catcher after trading Langeliers, you also have to look at the Contreras/Murphy trade. Contreras for Milwaukee has produced a 5.9 fWAR in 2023, 5.5 fWAR in 2024, and 2.5 fWAR so far in 2025. Oddly enough, Contreras was traded because of his defense, and immediately after going to Milwaukee, his defensive numbers went way up. Was it a wake up call or did Milwaukee unlock something? Murphy, by comparison: 5.0 fWAR in 2023, 0.8 in 2024, 2.4 in 2025.
So you played this game of musical chairs with your catchers, all to pretty much end up in a negative position. Murphy is not better than Langeliers, and certainly not better than Contreras if you believe the defensive metrics. And this all started because you didn’t want to give Freddie the 6th year.
Was all of this worth it? Why not just give Freddie the 6th year, hold onto Langeliers, trade Contreras for a starting pitcher or other position player, and just completely avoid the Murphy experience? AA keeps trying doing these Trader Joe moves where you take one guy and turn him into another guy then turn him into another guy, and he’s losing all of these (See: Kelenic, Jarred).
And then he thinks he out-thought the room by locking up all these young guys. How is that going?
Harris – 0.4 fWAR
Riley – 1.7 fWAR
Ozzie – 0.9 fWAR
Acuna – 2.6 fWAR
Murphy – 2.3 fWAR
Strider – 0.9 fWAR (and due $20M next year!)
Kelenic – dead (but not after spending $20M to get him)
I get that we’re going on 7 years now of feeling the effects of not being able to sign international free agents. That has absolutely crippled our farm system, and someone on Twitter rightly noted for me that Didier Fuentes is basically the only decent guy to come out of international signings since 2018, and he’s only 20 years old. So I know that he had to get creative.
But if we can start getting some international guys to hit, can we please stop trying to out-think the room? Graduate prospects or deal them, and then let them leave in free agency like everybody else does. It really seems like the macro strategy of what AA has tried to do over the last 3 years has completely blown up in his face and has culminated in the worst season in almost a decade.
We got older and worse at catcher. Why? I think that’s the part that will never make sense to me. Yes we needed to fill the gaping hole at 1B, but that should be the easiest position to fill. There had to be other ways. LF should be easy to fill too, and we can’t do that either, so maybe it’s not so easy. I dunno. I just can’t get past the fact that we basically gave up 10 wins at catcher.
I wasn’t a fan of trading Contreras at the time. However, wasn’t the fear of runners going wild on the basepaths a significant part of the thinking for getting Murphy? I kept reading that the limitations on throws to first and the bigger bases were going to change the game, and that Murphy would have an outstanding pop time and be able to contain the opposition better than Contreras or our other options.
Now, Murphy’s defense hasn’t seemed all that special even when he’s been healthy, and as you say, Contreras has been a lot better. But perhaps it’s just one of those situations where they had good reasons for doing what they did, and it just didn’t work out.
And while nobody wants to give management the benefit of the doubt for letting a beloved superstar walk, it may well be that Freddie’s agent is the true villain of the piece.
In Murphy’s defense, his fWAR would be higher this season if he wasn’t being benched for Ozuna a lot. The pitchers also seem to love throwing to him.
But I, too, was one of the fans who scratched their heads over the Wild Bill/Murphy trade.
Murphy is a fine player. And yet, he would have to be MVP level to justify that stupid trade. There’s no justifying it for a team with limited resources and holes. Everyone should stop trying. The Murphy trade is a significant contributor to why the Brewers and Braves are in their respective positions, and more importantly it signifies the relative competence of the two management groups.
Freeman…there is no justifying letting him go over 5 million after everything he did for our franchise. The only rationale is his agent really screwed him and us. I find it hard to believe there was no way to get it done and I think AA’s pride factored in equally.
AA’s pride has probably factored into a ton of deals/non-deals, and I think that’s my biggest issue here. He feels like he has to “win” the negotiation, or he won’t do it. Well, that’s great until other teams consistently say no to your trades (and you get nothing done at the trade deadline, for instance) or other teams outbid you (Freddie, the relievers last offseason, etc.).
Lately, his only real success has come in getting struggling players for nothing and they rebound (Rosario, Soler, Pederson in 2021), the similar concept of reclamation projects (Laureano, Whitfield, and Reynaldo Lopez, but has Reynaldo actually worked?), and salary dumps/reclamation projects via trade (Sale).
I think we can’t blame AA for trading Contreras the way everyone is, because he wasn’t going to be that player for us. That’s a failing of development, not transactions. We should be blaming AA for the failure of development, not trading the guy who sure seemed like a bat without a position.
Everyone is way off base:
https://x.com/EvanDrellich/status/1953516174664413419
Man, that’s pretty tone deaf. They must think they’re going to make a splash in the offseason.
I will say, even something like a Harris + prospects for Buxton would have me feeling a little chipper.
Well, if they continue spending little on bringing in help, then the fans will spend little on going to games.
Recapped
I’m glad Atlanta is not tanking. Like they have been all season, they show promise one day and look horrible this next. Of course they could have traded both Ozuna and Iglesias, got something for them and still not tanked