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Tuesday, September 27, 2005
McCann’s value unmatched
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
When the Great Historian sits down to write of the Braves of 2005, it’s my hunch that he may settle on the 8th inning of the 154th game as the key to the season. They had lost seven of 10 games. They hadn’t scored in 19 innings. Their division lead was dwindling. These “Our Gang” kids had never been under such a load as this. Were they folding in the stretch?
This was crunch time. Down 3-0 last Friday as they came to bat against the Marlins. This is how it worked out: Rafael Furcal doubled. Marcus Giles singled him home. (The drought was broken, at least.) Chipper Jones singled. Andruw Jones walked, probably unintentionally intentional. Adam LaRoche struck out. Jeff Francoeur grounded into a fielder’s choice, but Giles scored. Ryan Langerhans lobbed an infield single over second, Chipper scored and Francoeur wound up at third on an error. Brian McCann singled to center field, scoring Francoeur and the Braves had a 4-3 lead. It held up as the final score.
Now the pursuit is over. No. 14 is in their satchel. (You’ll notice I avoid the use of “consecutive” here, which means “in a row,” for it isn’t true. It does injustice to the Montreal Expos of 1994, the year the players struck and stuck a knife in baseball’s back. Season ended suddenly. Year of the hollow autumn, no World Series, but in the National League Green Book the Expos are shown in first place. But they were done for the season, and forever, but you can’t take first place away from them.) But… the Braves and No. 14, consecutive or not, a record to behold. One to be cuddled to your breast, the choicest of them all.
I say this, for it was done running a shuttle between Turner Field and Richmond, and of all places, Pearl, Miss., which strikes me as a misnomer. It was one emergency after another, and when the crisis arose, John Schuerholz went to the warehouse. His projected outfield including Brian Jordan and Raul Mondesi fell apart. Here came Kelly Johnson, then Francoeur. Langerhans was already in reserve, but now he came off the bench. And the pitchers, ye gods, where did they all come from? Kyle Davies was 21, Macay McBride was 22, Blaine Boyer was 23, John Foster had been reclaimed from the junk yard, and who was to catch them? A 21-year-old kid who had never yet suffered razor burn, McCann. Another “town boy,” so to speak.
Schuerholz had one other reserve starter in place, though the deal for Jorge Sosa hadn’t been a popular one. He gave up Nick Green, another local who had tidied up around second base when Giles came down wounded the year before. But the GM was exercising his craftsmanship. Right now, Sosa is the leading pitcher in the house. Not that all of Schuerholz’s deals work out so charmingly. There’s Dan Kolb, lost somewhere in the bullpen. And Mike Hampton, the highest paid pitcher in town, gone until 2007. Oh, well, as the woman who shot her husband explained to the judge, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
As the sun sets on the Braves, there comes a time to take a stand. True, Andruw Jones is on the ballot for Most Valuable Player in the league. Good, but unlikely to make it. We turned here to Most Valuable Brave, and the finger points to Furcal, with apology to no one. Statistics don’t play a part in this choice, though Furcal’s offensive production sparkles for a shortstop. There is no way to measure in statistics Furcal’s value to this team. Likely, Francoeur will be the people’s choice for Rookie of the Year, and who’s to quibble with that?
But we’re talking value here. It says something when crusty old John Smoltz selects McCann as his catcher of choice. He is a mere lad of 21 handling everything this crew of pitchers, old and young, can throw at him, lumps, bumps and all. A catcher is in on every play, a sort of unofficial quarterback. And it isn’t just defense, how do you like his .275 batting average, the key hits — as in that 8th inning — and his five home runs? McCann has aged under fire and passed all tests. Maybe not the flashiest, but most valuable rookie.
Permalink | Comments (35) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: OK, so Ashton Kutcher is 27 and Demi Moore is 42. That basically means that by the time he’s 35, no amount of surgery she gets will make a difference.
9: Item: The baseball players union has offered to increase its penalty for first-time steroid users to 20 games. Comment: It’s still a joke. Is there any reason why any athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs should be shown any leniency?
8: Seriously, we’ve had drug scandals, threats, promises, congressional testimony, more threats, more promises. Why after all this should anybody think, “Wow! Twenty games! What a concession!�
7: The answer to your next question: First offense: 50 games. Second offense: One year. Third offense: Bye-bye.
6: Gov. Knucklehead has canceled school for the first two weeks of October. Threat of rain.
5: Item: New England tackle Matt Light lays on the field with a serious leg injury, but coach Bill Belichick shoos Pittsburgh trainer John Norwig away when he offers medical assistance. Comment: There’s NFL paranoia and then there’s taking things overboard. Billy, you think the other team’s trainer is going to give Light an injection of truth serum and make him spill his guts on blocking schemes?
4: Martha Burk: Get a job.
3: It’s one thing to pressure Augusta National to have a women member. It’s a private club but hosts a very public golf tournament with PGA golfers and TV dollars, advertising, etc., etc. But to make a stink because the NHL’s TV commercials are too racy?
2: Yo, Martha. You really want to make this an issue? Start with the NFL. Every team’s website has a link to soft-porn cheerleader pages. But in the big picture, I mean, who freakin’ cares? This isn’t about women’s rights or equality.
1: By the way, that girl in the commercial may be as close to playing an NHL game as Ilya Kovalchuk.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Quick Hit
Winning theme bears repeating, even for the 14th consecutive time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
No writer in Cleveland has ever faced this dilemma, nor has any scribe in San Francisco or Cincinnati or anywhere else. Only here is it an issue: How do you write about a team about to clinch its division for the 14th consecutive full season without repeating yourself for the third time, the fifth time, the 14th time? How, at this ridiculously late date, do you say something new about the Braves finishing first?
“I don’t envy you that one,” said Frank Wren, the assistant GM, but Wren had an indirect hand in offering a partial solution. The former journalist John Schuerholz — his column for the Towson State Teachers College student paper was headed, “Under The Bench” — passed along an analogy made by the broadcaster Josh Lewin that Wren had relayed to his boss.
Said Schuerholz: “Lewin said, ‘I’ve run out of ways to describe the Atlanta Braves, and all I can think of is a stone crab. If a stone crab loses one of its claws, it regenerates another one. That’s what the Braves do — they regenerate themselves.’”
Here Schuerholz, not entirely modestly, offered his own editorial comment: “When the rest of baseball thinks the end has come, we regenerate ourselves.”
They do. They do it every year. They’re incredible that way. And how many times have these fingers typed this exact same paragraph? Five? Ten?
(Yeah, yeah. The Braves wasted a four-run lead and lost Monday night. Courtesy of the Mets’ late, late comeback against Philadelphia, the Braves also clinched a tie for the NL East title. They’ll win it outright tonight. And now, back to today’s topic.)
Said Jeff Porter, the trainer: “I know you’re trying to write something different, but there’s a pretty big common denominator.”
Yes. He wears No. 6. He’s the best manager we’ll ever see. (And yes, that’s a sentence that was written last September.) Porter again: “How many other guys could have taken all these rookies and made them into a team?”
The longer this run of titles goes, the clearer it becomes that Bobby Cox is a disproportionate part of the winning. Put it this way: If you handed the hugely gifted Florida Marlins to Cox, where would the Fish be today?
“Popping the champagne,” said one voice in the Braves’ clubhouse, and that’s a powerful image but not really a revelation. We said the same about the Phillies last season, when Cox managed circles around Larry Bowa, and about the Mets when the preening Bobby Valentine was in charge. News that Cox is without peer at running a team and a clubhouse no longer stops any presses. So where’s the novelty in No. 14?
Said Bill Acree, the equipment manager: “You start with all the new faces this year, but everybody’s going to say that.” And there have been, truth to tell, new faces almost all along. Acree again: “The first four or five [division winners] were pretty much the same guys, but not since.”
Sure, there have been more rookies than usual this season, but rookies have always been a part of this. (Chipper in 1995, Andruw in 1996, Furcal in 2000, Giles in 2001.) Even the improbable success of Jorge Sosa has antecedents in the pitching restorations of John Burkett and Jaret Wright. Put simply, the Braves have been doing this for so long there’s no way they can do it completely differently.
But if every regular season ends the same, each one takes a separate track to reach its appointed destination. This season could have been lost in May, when 60 percent of the rotation was hurting and Raul Mondesi was released, except that Braves’ seasons are never lost. They are only won. No, there’s nothing new about it, but there’s something majestic. Who knew the stone crab could be such a handsome creature?
Permalink | Comments (38) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
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