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Home > Terence Moore > Archives > 2008 > May > 16
Friday, May 16, 2008
Braves understand every game counts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Even though they don’t always play like it, especially away from Turner Field, you get the feeling the Braves know the secret for success in August and September during a tight division race.
It is playing as intensely as you can in April and May. You also can throw in June and July. That’s the whole baseball season, by the way.
“I can’t imagine someone in this division pulling away from everybody else, or even one team being up by more than five or six games at a given time,” said Braves right fielder Jeff Francoeur. “There are just too many good teams and too many even teams. If somebody stayed healthy, it might happen, but there are too many teams with the same kind of pitching staffs. We all have a bunch of older pitchers.”
The point is, the National League East will stay as cozy as it is now through the rest of the spring, summer and fall. That means the Braves’ fight against the New York Mets, the Philadelphia Phillies and maybe the inexperienced but pesky Florida Marlins down the stretch began last month and continues this weekend.
For instance: The Oakland A’s are in town, and they aren’t from the same league, let alone the same division. Even so, you get the feeling the Braves have the mind-set that these games against Oakland are part of that August and September battle for the NL East. The same goes for the way they approach games between now and then against everybody else. You get that feeling because enough Braves keep suggesting that they understand as much.
“I think we do,” said catcher Brian McCann. “The more you sit back and you act like it’s not a pennant race right now, then I think you get to those last two months and you’re trying to make up a bunch of games, and that’s tough. I think the games now are just as important as they are in the final months.”
If that sounds like a cliché, it is, but you know what? It’s true. Just ask the San Diego Padres, still imploding after the events of last Sept. 29. On that day in Milwaukee, they were within a strike of reaching the playoffs, but they lost. They were caught by a Colorado team winning 21 of its last 22 games, and then they dropped a one-game playoff to the Rockies. Which brings us to hindsight: All the Padres had to do to avoid that late-season horror was secure an early-season victory during one of those games that got away.
The Braves don’t want to operate in hindsight.
“When we were in the [NL] West, that was really tough when we beat the Giants,” said manager Bobby Cox. “We won 104 games, and they won 103. You knew at the start of that year it was going to be tight. But this division, right from the start, I don’t think anybody gave Florida much credit for being in the race, but they are. They can hit, and they’re getting good pitching.”
It’s a combination that has the Marlins atop the division despite losing Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis in the offseason. The Phillies and the Mets aren’t far behind, and the Braves are a tiny winning streak from the lead. Not only that, the Braves hope to keep it that way until the disabled list releases a slew of their pitchers.
Said Cox, “We had a strong team when we broke spring training, and we still do. We’ve been missing [John] Smoltz and our two top relievers in [Peter] Moylan and [Rafael] Soriano. And [Mike] Hampton, we thought he’d win 15 the way he threw in the spring. It was no fluke. So if we get all that squared away …”
There is the meantime, though, for the Braves. They’ve got to treat the “meantime” as if it is the last time to get it right for a 15th division title in 17 years.
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