Thanks to Ben Marguiles, Tony Mottola and Mariah herself for the title inspiration.

Somehow, my wife struggled through the log in process to get my 99.99 full season “Braves Vision” pass working Sunday. So, last night was the first whole game I have watched on that. Some observations on Braves Vision.

Get some new advertisers. I saw a “pro Rick Jackson for Governor” commercial probably 10 times. The SAME commercial. Newt Gingrich endorses Rick Jackson. It almost made me wish Rick ran a few of the “hit job on Burt Jones” ads for variety. And, “AI on Google cloud” came on at least 10 times. It does make me hopeful that the revenue will tick up as they implement things.

Otherwise, good broadcast booth and good post game. Whenever Peter Moylan is on, you are going to get a few good ones.Peter gave his right arm for the team, and he gets a good gig, at which he is quite capable and talented.

To the game. Bryce Elder was “good Bryce Elder.” 6 IP on 83 pitches, 5 k’s, 1 BB, 5 hits (WHIP 1.00). And, for this game, Mauricio Dubon wasn’t on top of sharpness and possibly could have calmed a little of that down. I was kind of thinking Weiss might let him go one more inning, but “the followers” were pretty good. First, “Good Aaron Bummer” (1 IP, 2 K’s otherwise 0’s), then “wobbly but not bad” Robert Suarez one inning, one hit, otherwise 0’s) but helped with fielding), and then “the excellent pitch to contact version” of Raisel Iglesias (3 up, 3 down, 8 pitches, 7 strikes, 2 groundouts). These 4 guys produced the seasons SECOND shut out.

The offense was mostly early and heavily helped by the Unathletics’ pitcher Jacob Lopez feeling challenged by the whole concept of a strike zone. Out of 91 pitches over 4 innings, only 46 were strikes. He gave up 5 BB’s. When you add 5 BB’s to 5 hits in only 4 innings, he is actually lucky the thing didn’t spiral further out of control. Braves scored 3 in the first, which had to help Elder to know he was essentially never one pitch away from being the “losing pitcher.” Their pen almost shut everything down until Skip Caray sent them to Progressive in the 8th inning to get one more. The hitting star was probably the aforementioned Mauricio Dubon who went 3 for 4 with 3 RBI’s and now boasts a season OPS of .995. Meanwhile, Ronald Acuna showed signs of life with 2 BB’s and 2 hits (one bloop and one smoker) for an OPS so far of .639. I just have a feeling those 2 OPS numbers will seem flipped in a month.

So, tonight, it is the Athletically Challenged again at 7:15 with them bringing Aaron Civale out to face Jose Suarez. Jose can you see how to get Elder’s results?