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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > July > 13
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Weak hitting confounds good pitching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you can pitch, you’ll be OK: That has been the way of baseball since before Christy Mathewson was flinging his fadeaway, and it’s almost invariably the way now. The 2008 Braves stand as a case study of the variable: They can pitch, but they’re not OK.
They hit the All-Star break 6-1/2 games out of first place and five out of third. They hold the National League’s 10th-best record. They do this despite having compiled its lowest ERA.
The concept of pitching is simple — if your pitchers keep enough games close, you’ll win enough of them to be a winning team. The Braves have done the first part but not the second. They’re 40-28 in games decided by two or more runs; they’re 5-22 in one-run games. Tim Hudson has the league’s 10th-lowest ERA, but the Braves are only 9-11 in his starts.
The Braves were correct in their offseason self-assessment: They did indeed collect a wealth of starting pitchers. If they hadn’t, they’d be in last place. The Braves reached the break having received just five victories from the aging threesome of John Smoltz, Tom Glavine and Mike Hampton, and with 67 games remaining they still have a chance to finish first. That’s the good news.
The bad is that it isn’t a very good chance. As we applaud the Braves for their reasoned emphasis on pitching, we must also fault them for their failure to flesh out this roster. Sports Illustrated notes that the Braves have devoted 62.2 percent of their payroll to pitching — only Arizona and Milwaukee have earmarked more — and it shows. Over the season’s first three months, they hit better for average than for production, and lately they haven’t hit much at all.
Should we be surprised? Even when healthy, Mark Kotsay and Matt Diaz are journeymen. Kelly Johnson is the epitome of an average big-leaguer — neither embarrassing nor exceptional. Chipper Jones and Brian McCann are exceptional, and Yunel Escobar could be. Mark Teixeira has had tremendous seasons, but this isn’t yet one of them, and Jeff Francoeur stopped hitting to the extent that the Braves treated him to a holiday weekend in Mississippi.
The Braves hold out hope for these last 67 games because they believe, not for the first time, that they’re about to get healthy. Trouble is, most of the returnees are apt to be pitchers, and it’s unlikely this team can pitch much better than it has. (Roger McDowell deserves a gold star.) The keys to the next 2-1/2 months are the same as the keys to the past 3-1/2 — both Teixeira and Francoeur have to hit. With this lineup, there are no other options.
The break arrives with the Braves in no man’s land. They’re not so far behind as to give up on the season, not so close as to become an active buyer. So long as they’re within eight games of first place, the Braves will surely resist the urge to dump Teixeira. But do they dare spend to import another bat with the odds arrayed against success?
They’ve surged from greater deficits — 9-1/2 games back at the 1991 All-Star break, nine behind in 1993 — to finish first. For a better team, there’d be time enough to pull this off. That’s the thing, though. Not since Memorial Day have the Braves looked like much of a team.
To their credit, they’ve hung around in a season where, as Chipper Jones has said, “we could have gotten our doors blown off.” But the time for hanging around is over. Come Friday night, this unassuming team must play as if it’s 1993 all over again. Good luck with that.
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