Atlanta Braves: A Quarter-Pole Perspective On Just What This Team Is

Sometimes the best way to know where you are going is to look and see where you have been. Our Atlanta Braves are 19-23 and will play their 43rd game of the season tonight at SunTrust Park, putting them just over a quarter of the way through the schedule. Things have been worse.

Just past the quarter pole of the beautifully brutal marathon that is the Major League Baseball season, our Atlanta Braves have proven thus far markedly more capable and monstrously more resilient than last year’s iteration.

More Capable

Heading into our (yes, I’m proudly one of those fans) 43rd game of game of the season at four games under level ball, none of us, I dare assume, would say this has been a great first quarter.

Sunday was May 21st on which our guys played their 41st game of the year, losing to the Gnats and falling to 18-23. On May 21st, 2016, we beat The Phillies 2-0 “improving” our record to 12-30. Now, for anyone not spending their spare time solving equations at prestigious engineering schools, that means we were eight games under .500 through our first 42 games of the season on this day last year.

In that game against the Phills, our starting pitcher was Williams Perez, and our lineup was as follows:

Chase d’Arnaud 3B

Gordon Beckham 2B

Freddie Freeman 1B

Jeff Francoeur LF

Nick (worth every penny) Markakis RF

Tyler Flowers C

Ender Inciarte CF

Erick Aybar SS

Now, I don’t have a thing against any one of those players because everyone in that lineup did or does play hard for us, but if Frenchy is in your cleanup spot, you have fallen on black days (wink).

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Just as a snap shot, that lineup, though victorious, on that day left nine men on base, and Francoeur, himself, stranded three in scoring position. Our lineup Sunday, featured a solar-discharge hot Matt Kemp (2-4) hitting cleanup and nearly snuck one on a clutch double from our emerging, rookie short stop on a day that Stephen Strasburg painted like Van Gogh with two good ears.

The point is our club is more competitive on paper and on the field than it was this time last year, and that is a credit to the front office.

More Resilient

We just lived through a week where our Braves went 3-1 against a Toronto Blue Jays staff that, apparently, thinks the term “front door breaking ball” means you start it at the front door to your clubhouse and break it off into the opposing hitter’s waist. A series the crescendo of which was on Wednesday when our MVP candidate first baseman took a missile off his wrist, effectively gutting the bulk his season.

Friday brought the Nationals to town, and, maybe I’m the pessimist in the room, but I saw a sweep at their hands kicking off what would wind up being a massive and hopeless deluge of losing baseball as inevitable.

Once again, our guys took it on the chin (or hip, I should say) and took two out of three games from our division leader. Once again, our guys proved their mettle.

Frankly, I am still shocked we won that series against Washington, and I had this strange feeling creeping up Sunday watching Dansby Swanson’s clutch two-run double flying through the air late in a game that looked long lost…I actually thought, “We’re gonna win this game”…

We did not win that game, but no one will convince me that last year’s team would not only have delivered the sweep and dark-night-of-the-soul losing bender I was expecting but would have done so in a way so spectacularly depressing that it still would have, somehow, hurt.

The point is our club has more heart and fight than it did at this point last year, and that is a credit to Brian Snitker.

Next: Atlanta Sports: Saturday, May 20th Was Cathartic and Cleansing

Some would say our slightly improved team is the sum of veteran additions…Some would say it is the work of a better manager. I believe it is both.

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