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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > May > 26
Monday, May 26, 2008
Braves on road to greatness
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Memorial Day arrived with the Braves in second place. They’ll be in first by the Fourth of July, and come Labor Day they’ll be pulling away.
Only a team of playoff caliber could have handled all the Braves have been forced to handle, and eventually some of these pitchers will get healthy. (Though let’s resolve here and now never to count on Mike Hampton for anything. Our motto: We won’t get fooled again.)
Baseball’s regular season is the great revealer. Any team can get hot for a week or a month, but over 162 games luck flattens out, leaving depth and endurance to prevail. The Braves have already demonstrated the former: With half the staff on the disabled list, they entered play Monday second in the league in ERA; with Mark Teixeira and Jeff Francoeur hitting below .270, the Braves still stood second in batting average.
“We thought we had as good a team as anybody in spring training,” Bobby Cox said. “And we still do.”
We can forget the curious home/road discrepancy. That will flatten out, too. What will ultimately propel this team to the top of the NL East is its professionalism and attention to detail. The Braves have been good for a long time now, but they haven’t always been this meticulous. No matter what mix-and-match lineup Cox has deployed this season, the effect has usually been precision itself.
Consider Monday’s game. Facing Brandon Webb, the league’s best pitcher, they put the ball in play early and often. Good things kept happening. “We didn’t hit him hard,” said Cox, in a rare admission, but they had five runs before they made their sixth out.
The key blows, such as they were: An infield hit by Yunel Escobar; a Chipper Jones single so meek Escobar couldn’t advance; Teixeira’s polite double down the line; a solid single by Gregor Blanco, and a broken-bat flare by Teixeira. Not for nothing did the Braves report for work having struck out fewer times than any other National League team. (See what happens without the whiffmaster Andruw Jones?)
Teixeira finished with four RBIs, yet another sunny sign. “I expect more out of myself,” he said, and it would be a shock if July dawns and this craftsman is still hitting .267. Even so, no Brave — not Teixeira, not Francoeur, not Matt Diaz — has been a complete washout. “Chipper [Jones] and Mac [Brian McCann] have been carrying us, along with Yunel and [Mark] Kotsay,” Teixeira said. “But we’ve all been contributing.”
This isn’t a lineup that rises and falls with one man, and if two months have taught us anything it’s that the same can be said of the pitching staff. Teixeira again: “If you’d have told us all the names we’d be missing in the rotation and the bullpen and that we’d be two games out of first place, I think we’d have taken it.”
Said Cox: “We’ve played exceptionally great. The defense has been great. The bullpen has been great.”
Even if Hampton never starts another big-league game and John Smoltz can’t find a place to pitch that will accommodate his aging arm, there’s enough here to take the East. Florida won’t hold up. The Mets announced Monday they’re keeping Willie Randolph, which is a colossal mistake. That leaves Philadelphia, and the Phils aren’t apt to win a second consecutive division title with so few arms.
These two months haven’t followed the script, but by ad-libbing so glibly the Braves have proved that their Plans B and C are as potent as most teams’ grand designs. Imagine how good this team will be when/if it ever gets to rely on Plan A.
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