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Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Hudson shows he’s an anchor
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
New York - Tim Hudson was good last season, but he was brought to Atlanta to be something more than that. Teams acquire good pitchers to be the No. 2 or 3 starter. But when that pitcher is given a contract extension worth up to $58 million, it’s clear that something more than good is expected.
On Tuesday, Tim Hudson was something more than good.
He started with five perfect innings. He allowed only one hit, walked one and struck out six in a complete game 2-1 win over the New York Mets. The fact the performance came in a mound battle with Tom Glavine, a centerpiece of past Braves’ rotations and suddenly a force again, merely added punctuation.
“He’s going to be the guy everybody looks to in the next four or five years to anchor the staff,” John Smoltz said. “If he’s going to get beat, that’s the kind of game I expect him to get beat in — a 2-1 game. What we saw in the first three games this year — I don’t think we’ll be seeing that again.”
After a good but not overwhelming first season with the Braves, one that included a month on the disabled list, Hudson hoped to settle in this season. But when the gate opened in Los Angeles, he was drilled for five runs in four innings on Opening Day. Through three starts, he had allowed 17 runs (15 earned), 23 hits and eight walks, lasting only 4, 4 and 6 2/3 innings.
His ERA entering Wednesday: 9.20. In terms of “anchoring a staff,” that’s not the definition the Braves were looking for.
“I wouldn’t say there’s been pressure,” Hudson said when asked about expectations following the trade that brought him from Oakland. “There’s just a period of adjustment. Any time you’re going to a new organization with new teammates in a new league, there are things to get used to. Last year was kind of a blur. We had a new baby to start the year. It was kind of a whirlwind. This year feels a lot more settled. It feels like it’s supposed to feel — except for the three [lousy] games to start the year.”
Hudson went 92-39 in six years with Oakland, but fell victim to the franchise’s economic downsizing (sounds better than saying the A’s decided to do things on the cheap). The Braves acquired him for three players in the winter, then gave him a contract extension worth at least $47 million over four years, or $58 million if an option is exercised in 2010.
At the time of the deal, the Braves’ plan for Hudson was clear. Smoltz was being moved back to the rotation from the bullpen but there was uncertainty how his arm would hold up. Hudson was the only sure thing the team had. Smoltz started 0-3, then went 12-2 with a 2.34 ERA in his next 20 starts, but wore down with injuries (neck, back, shoulder) in the final two months.
Hudson was merely … pretty good. A year ago Tuesday, he battled Roger Clemens and threw a four-hit shutout for nine innings, and the Braves won in 12, 1-0. He had consecutive complete game wins late in the season. But he also had a two-month stretch in which he had two wins in nine starts and went on the DL with a strained oblique. He finished the year 14-9 — good but not ace-of-staff-great.
That wasn’t the case the Mets. After the game, he credited pitching coaching Roger McDowell for helping correct some flaws in his delivery, and it showed. He retired 15 straight, until Ramon Castro singled in the sixth. The Mets had runners on second and third with one out, but Jose Reyes flied out, and left fielder Matt Diaz nailed Castro with a perfect throw to the plate. Hudson celebrated like it was game seven.
“I almost blew my leg out, jumping up,” Hudson joked. “I was raising [heck] from the plate to the dugout. When I sat down, I felt like I had just run a mile.”
The Mets finally got to Hudson in the ninth with a double and an RBI single. Manager Bobby Cox made a quick trip to the mound but Hudson assured him he was fine. Hudson then got Carlos Delgado on a fly to deep left and David Wright on a fielder’s choice.
“This one was fun for me personally, given the way the year started,” Hudson said.
He was better than Opening Day, but just what the Braves have expected.
Permalink | Comments (36) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
Kobe or LeBron?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
My pick for the NBA’s most valuable player? Tough one. LeBron James should win, but Kobe Bryant will.
All of that flashy scoring by Bryant will blind the senses of the voters. In addition to remembering that he’s just the third player in league history to average at least 35 points per game, they’ll remember his 81-point game, along with the slew of other times where he managed 50 or more.
But here’s my idea of the MVP of a given league: The guy whose winning team crashes the most when that guy is removed from the lineup.
That guy is James. Without him, the Cleveland Cavaliers return to their numerous years as the Cadavers.
Come to think of it, the Lakers without Bryant are dead, too. And he does something else that MVPs do, and that is he makes others around him better (see Kwame Brown, suddenly a force out of nowhere after years as a farce).
OK. I’ll go with Kobe.
Permalink | Comments (39) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Kobe or LeBron?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
My pick for the NBA’s most valuable player? Tough one. LeBron James should win, but Kobe Bryant will.
All of that flashy scoring by Bryant will blind the senses of the voters. In addition to remembering that he’s just the third player in league history to average at least 35 points per game, they’ll remember his 81-point game, along with the slew of other times where he managed 50 or more.
But here’s my idea of the MVP of a given league: The guy whose winning team crashes the most when that guy is removed from the lineup.
That guy is James. Without him, the Cleveland Cavaliers return to their numerous years as the Cadavers.
Come to think of it, the Lakers without Bryant are dead, too. And he does something else that MVPs do, and that is he makes others around him better (see Kwame Brown, suddenly a force out of nowhere after years as a farce).
OK. I’ll go with Kobe.
Permalink | | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
As always, Mets get the reality slap
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
New York — If there was one thing that we all learned about the Braves on Tuesday night, it’s that they’ve got spunk. I mean, here it is the dog days of April, the division race over — and yet the Braves managed to pull together for one magical night to slay the mighty New York Mets, who were 10-2, toppled several countries and ate Godzilla.
Oh, they’ll be talking about this for years.
The morning after the Mets’ resounding, dominating, dare I say overwhelming, 4-3 win over the Braves, a headline in Tuesday’s New York Post blared: “BRAVE NEW WORLD. Mets show Atlanta who’s boss.”
In the Daily News, the game story began: “Don’t worry Braves, there’s always the wild card.”
It’s a wonder anybody made it to game two of the series, what with parade traffic.
Then the Braves won, 7-1.
Keep hope alive.
Just so you know, I did the math. The Mets’ magic number to clinch the National League East over the Braves remains at 145.
“We better get to work,” Marcus Giles cracked.
“That’s New York,” Adam LaRoche said. “I’m sure by next week, the story will be, ‘Better luck next year.’ “
And this: “We’re a few games back in April. We’re not sweating.”
Yes, it’s April on all parts of the globe except Flushing, where it’s October.
Since they last won a World Series in 1986, there generally have been two absolutes about the New York Mets: 1) They’re supposed to be great; 2) They’re not. Only with that coupled entry can a franchise have such spectacular and amusing crashes.
The Mets have watched the Braves win the division all too often. I guess they figure if they have a five-game lead in April, best to milk it for all it’s worth. You would just think that after so much misery and Atlanta’s 14 straight division titles, spring celebrations would be, um, tempered.
“The commissioner tells me we get to play the entire schedule,” Bobby Cox said.
Really?
“Yeah. I talked to Bud today.”
Why does this happen? How is it that clear-thinking people — work with me here, for the sake of argument — can look at the Braves being 6-8 and declare them dead? In the NFL, they would be dead.
In baseball, they haven’t even gone once through the sock drawer yet.
The Braves are now 7-8. But mortal starts are not uncommon for them. They were 7-8 at this time a year ago. They were 33-32 in mid-June. They were 37-40 through June in 2004. They were 26-26 through May in 2001. If there weren’t 162 games, it would be a problem. There are. It isn’t.
The only difference this season is that the Mets actually have lived up to the hype. (Well, some of it.) Over the past two years, they have added Carlos Beltran, Pedro Martinez, Carlos Delgado, Paul Lo Duca and Billy Wagner. Some things, apparently, even the Mets can’t mess up.
But Tuesday was the inevitable reality slap. Andruw Jones hit two home runs. LaRoche hit another. The Braves, playing without Chipper Jones and Edgar Renteria, led 5-0 through three innings — and the Mets hadn’t even set their playoff rotation yet.
Kyle Davies threw a complete game. He allowed only three hits and struck out six. So it turns out that a Braves pitcher actually can throw a strike without Leo Mazzone. OK. So what’s next week’s premature panic attack going to be?
“It seems like the same story every year,” Giles said. “Slow April, hot summer and a disappointing postseason, to be honest with you. The point is there’s no need to worry. It’s just to give people something to write about. Don’t get me wrong — this division is not ours. But there’s definitely no need to panic right now.”
Or celebrate.
Tom Glavine, the former Brave, has seen this race from both sides. He has a little more perspective than Joe from Queens.
“It’s funny,” Glavine said when asked about the hype surrounding this series. “This organization obviously hasn’t had the success we’ve wanted to have. The Braves are the envy of everybody in baseball, except for maybe the Yankees. Any time you have the opportunity to be one up on the prohibitive favorite, people are gonna run with it. As players, we’re more mindful of how this plays out in October than where we are right now.”
Meanwhile, the Mets lost. They’re six games out of last.
Permalink | Comments (64) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Jeff Schultz
lack of defense was Thrashers’ demise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wendy Parker
Sunrise, Fla. — The Thrashers were one period short of making Tuesday the biggest night in their existence. Instead it became just another final game — an overtime loss, not that it mattered — in another failed season, and the adjective, while cruel, is nonetheless apt. “As a team, we said before the season that if we didn’t make the playoffs it would be a failure,” said Scott Mellanby, the captain. “We still feel that way.” This team expected to make the playoffs. Its general manager guaranteed it would make the playoffs. Instead this becomes the most gifted aggregation that won’t be chasing the Stanley Cup. “This has been the toughest year,” general manager Don Waddell said. “There was so much pressure. This is tough to swallow.” It is. But missing the playoffs shouldn’t be seen as cause for the guarantor to be canned and his blueprint wadded up. Much of what Waddell envisioned the Thrashers being has come to fruition. They can score with anybody. (“We built this as an offensive team,” he said, telling no lies.) Some tweaking, however, seems in order. Put simply, the Thrashers have overcommitted to offense. Of their half-dozen best players, only one — Niclas Havelid — is a defenseman. “We have to think about committing more resources to the back end,” said Waddell, and spending big money on a big-ticket defensemen is something this franchise hasn’t yet done. For the Thrashers to become a bona fide Cup contender, that needs to happen ASAP. A more imposing backline would make it easier on those nights the No. 1 goalie cannot go. It would have been nice if Kari Lehtonen had played 58 games, as opposed to 38, but the Thrashers sometimes seemed unwilling to modulate their style to accommodate Lehtonen’s understudies. Some nights — Monday in Washington, for example — it’s necessary to nurse a one-goal lead through the final 20 minutes, to rely on those old-time hockey virtues of checking and defending. Instead the game got wild, as happened in Pittsburgh back in October (a 4-0 lead became a 7-5 defeat) and in Los Angeles in January (a come-from-ahead 8-6 loss). When you miss the playoffs by the skinniest of margins, you wind up fixating on squandered points. As Waddell noted, “We can win games 5-4 and 6-5,” but the trouble with high-scoring games is that weird things can happen at the end. The Thrashers need to take their lead from Archie Bell and (ahem) tighten up. Apparently assuming their offensive prowess would bail them out, they developed a penchant for falling behind — they trailed in the second period of Games 79, 80 and 81 — even as they were making their playoff surge. What this team must grasp is that inherent scoring skill will work just as well in a 3-2 game as in a 6-5 careen-a-thon. Internally the Thrashers believe that, had Lehtonen not gotten hurt, they’d have been one of the East’s top seeds, and perhaps they would. But the cold truth is that this team still coulda/shoulda made the playoffs. It had the talent. Sorry to say, it didn’t quite have the mesh. “When we had everybody healthy, we could run with anybody,” Waddell said, and maybe that was this team’s undoing. Maybe it focused overmuch on skating and scoring, occasionally misplacing its attention to detail. Over a 6 1/2-month regular season, that small failing wound up being the difference between adjourning after the 82nd game and flying north to open a first-round series Friday night. To their credit, the Thrashers gave it a go at the end. Said Waddell, pride in his voice: “We’ve been playing Game 7s the last three weeks.” But next season there will be no distinction in merely coming close. Next season the Thrashers cannot fall a game short or a point short. Next season they have to play their way into May. Toward that end, did the GM have any guarantees for 2007? “Don’t get me started with that one,” said Waddell, the pain of one broken promise still too new and too raw.
Permalink | |
Lack of defense was Thrashers’ demise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Sunrise, Fla. — The Thrashers were one period short of making Tuesday the biggest night in their existence. Instead it became just another final game — an overtime loss, not that it mattered — in another failed season, and the adjective, while cruel, is nonetheless apt.
“As a team, we said before the season that if we didn’t make the playoffs it would be a failure,” said Scott Mellanby, the captain. “We still feel that way.”
This team expected to make the playoffs. Its general manager guaranteed it would make the playoffs. Instead this becomes the most gifted aggregation that won’t be chasing the Stanley Cup.
“This has been the toughest year,” general manager Don Waddell said. “There was so much pressure. This is tough to swallow.”
It is. But missing the playoffs shouldn’t be seen as cause for the guarantor to be canned and his blueprint wadded up. Much of what Waddell envisioned the Thrashers being has come to fruition. They can score with anybody. (“We built this as an offensive team,” he said, telling no lies.) Some tweaking, however, seems in order. Put simply, the Thrashers have overcommitted to offense.
Of their half-dozen best players, only one — Niclas Havelid — is a defenseman. “We have to think about committing more resources to the back end,” said Waddell, and spending big money on a big-ticket defensemen is something this franchise hasn’t yet done. For the Thrashers to become a bona fide Cup contender, that needs to happen ASAP.
A more imposing backline would make it easier on those nights the No. 1 goalie cannot go. It would have been nice if Kari Lehtonen had played 58 games, as opposed to 38, but the Thrashers sometimes seemed unwilling to modulate their style to accommodate Lehtonen’s understudies. Some nights — Monday in Washington, for example — it’s necessary to nurse a one-goal lead through the final 20 minutes, to rely on those old-time hockey virtues of checking and defending.
Instead the game got wild, as happened in Pittsburgh back in October (a 4-0 lead became a 7-5 defeat) and in Los Angeles in January (a come-from-ahead 8-6 loss). When you miss the playoffs by the skinniest of margins, you wind up fixating on squandered points. As Waddell noted, “We can win games 5-4 and 6-5,” but the trouble with high-scoring games is that weird things can happen at the end.
The Thrashers need to take their lead from Archie Bell and (ahem) tighten up. Apparently assuming their offensive prowess would bail them out, they developed a penchant for falling behind — they trailed in the second period of Games 79, 80 and 81 — even as they were making their playoff surge. What this team must grasp is that inherent scoring skill will work just as well in a 3-2 game as in a 6-5 careen-a-thon.
Internally the Thrashers believe that, had Lehtonen not gotten hurt, they’d have been one of the East’s top seeds, and perhaps they would. But the cold truth is that this team still coulda/shoulda made the playoffs. It had the talent. Sorry to say, it didn’t quite have the mesh.
“When we had everybody healthy, we could run with anybody,” Waddell said, and maybe that was this team’s undoing. Maybe it focused overmuch on skating and scoring, occasionally misplacing its attention to detail. Over a 6 1/2-month regular season, that small failing wound up being the difference between adjourning after the 82nd game and flying north to open a first-round series Friday night.
To their credit, the Thrashers gave it a go at the end. Said Waddell, pride in his voice: “We’ve been playing Game 7s the last three weeks.”
But next season there will be no distinction in merely coming close. Next season the Thrashers cannot fall a game short or a point short. Next season they have to play their way into May.
Toward that end, did the GM have any guarantees for 2007?
“Don’t get me started with that one,” said Waddell, the pain of one broken promise still too new and too raw.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Thrashers / NHL
