This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > July > 06
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Epic could be start of something good
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You can’t know until later. On June 27, 2004, we couldn’t know that a seven-run eighth inning in Baltimore would be the spark that set a sub-.500 team alight. On May 15, 2001, we couldn’t know that an eighth-inning grand slam by the rookie Marcus Giles (off Mike Hampton, of all people) would rouse a team that had drifted six games behind Philadelphia.
So, in the here and now, no one among Braves was characterizing one elongated victory as anything more than a nice springboard to a West Coast getaway. “We’ll talk about a winning streak after [today’s game in Los Angeles],” Chipper Jones said.
And yet …
A team starved for any sliver of good news left town on the wings of a fairly epic victory. The Braves trotted out a sickly lineup — starters included Gregor Blanco, Omar Infante, Martin Prado, Greg Norton and everyone’s favorite Corky Miller — and proceeded to fall four runs behind. They tied the game in the eighth on Yunel Escobar’s two-out single, and there it stayed for hours, days, years.
Six Braves relievers worked the equivalent of an 11-inning shutout. Every Braves run was driven in by one of the three legitimate hitters among the starting eight, and the runs were well spaced — three in the first three innings, three more in the seventh and eighth, no more until the Braves mustered the winner in the 17th inning on the strength of four (count ‘em) consecutive singles.
The game should have ended two innings earlier. With runners on second and third and one out and the infield draw in, Houston’s Ty Wigginton smashed a liner into the hole between third and short. His reaction time essentially halved by playing so close to the batter, Escobar nonetheless threw himself into the air and flung his glove across his body and caught the darn ball with, as Jones would say later, “the last inch of his glove.”
This wasn’t quite Otis Nixon scaling the wall to thwart Andy Van Slyke, but it was as fine a play as any Braves infielder has made in the last quarter-century. “Walt Weiss relived,” said Jones, recalling the stop made by the shortstop in Game 3 of the 1999 division series against, of all teams, the Astros. “[Escobar’s catch] is one of the most incredible plays I’ve ever seen.”
The incredible used to arrive as a matter of routine around here, but it has lately been in short supply. About the only thing that has beggared belief about the 2008 Braves is the scope of their disabled list, which, if you can believe it, stands to grow by three more names today. (Jeff Bennett hurt himself Saturday, and Infante and Manny Acosta limped off Sunday.) “Never had that happen before,” said Bobby Cox, meaning DL-ing three guys in one procedural swoop.
Injuries will probably scuttle this team, but for the moment hope still floats. The Braves needed five hours and 35 minutes — plus Philadelphia’s 12-inning rain-delayed loss to the Mets — to do it, but they shaved a game off their deficit Sunday, and they could still hit the All-Star break within hailing distance of first place. They’re hanging in, just.
“This team has two faces,” Jones said. “One of the faces is very good. The other is not so pretty — we can be an ugly team. We’ve got to bury that team.”
They do, and the shoveling has to start this week. Or else we’ll recall Escobar’s whirling intervention as just a footnote in a failed season, assuming we recall it at all.
Permalink | Comments (64) | Post your comment | Categories: Braves/MLB
