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Saturday, June 10, 2006
Jackets now need to win one
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
As the healthy remainder of Georgia Tech’s baseball team staged a celebration dog pile near the pitcher’s mound Saturday, Danny Hall stood back and tried not to flash back.
Another win. Another trip to Omaha. Another chance. One step at a time — isn’t that what he keeps telling his players? He shows them the pyramid at the start of the season. He preaches one pitch at a time, one game, one series. Eventually, you get to Omaha. Forget last week or last year. Or in Hall’s case, the last several.
“[Former athletics director] Homer Rice told me the first year I was here, when we played for the national championship, he said, ‘You really screwed up. Now the expectations of you and your team are going to be so high — I don’t know if you’ll survive,’ ” Hall said Saturday.
“He said it jokingly. But he might’ve been right.”
Hall has survived. For the seventh time in his coaching career and the third time at Tech, he has helped a school get to the College World Series.
Sure would be nice to win one.
If the Jackets win in Omaha, Hall said his “first emotion would be elation, not relief.” I’m thinking it’s more like 50-50. Climbing so many layers of that pyramid without kissing the top can wear on a man.
Maybe this Georgia Tech team will be different. It certainly has operated differently. It has endured a dog pile of injuries to reach the final eight. It has won five straight in the tournament, punctuating this run Saturday with a 12-3 win over College of Charleston.
The Yellow Jackets are 17-4 since May.
They’re doing this despite being — as one friend of Hall’s text-messaged him Friday — “the best one-legged team” anybody has ever seen.
Jeff Kindel, the left fielder who hit a two-run homer Saturday, is playing with a torn knee ligament. Wes Hodges, the designated hitter who drove in two runs, has a stress fracture in his lower leg. Second baseman Mike Trapani has a sprained knee. Pitcher Tim Gustafson (shoulder) might not make it to Omaha. And did we mention the starting center fielder, Danny Payne, was lost for the season?
A few players were told to avoid the postgame pile-up. Duh.
Pitcher Lee Hyde said a few of them “just kind of hugged each other.”
Resilience counts for something. If this Jackets team accomplishes something none of its predecessors have, there’s a reason.
“We have a lot of intangibles,” Hall said. “Their competitive spirit, their courage. That’s not to take anything away from the other two teams that went out there. But it just seems like we have more unselfish guys who love to compete.”
Hall admits history has built a mental block with his players. He said, “It’s something we try to deflate.”
The question is how he gets past it himself. As an assistant coach with Michigan, he made it to the College World Series in four out of his first five seasons there. The Wolverines whiffed each time.
Tech has reached the CWS twice, once in Hall’s first season in 1994 (runner-up) and again in 2002 (fifth place). It had lost in the super regional the past two seasons.
Few college programs can claim such a rich baseball tradition, but one so often diluted by a season-ending loss. This is the Jackets’ 21st tournament appearance in the past 22 years. But the end result has been two trips to Omaha, one final appearance and no championships.
And you thought the Braves had the monopoly on teases.
Asked how he has dealt with it, Hall said, “The same way I tell the players to. You just try to prepare your team, put the pieces together and go from there.”
It says something that, while the Jackets are in pieces, they’re still together. Consider Saturday’s starting pitcher. Hyde was moved from the rotation to the bullpen this year but back to starter for the NCAA tournament because of his experience. He responded by allowing two earned runs in eight innings.
Nice week for the kid. The Braves drafted him the other day. Between his performance and the Braves’ bullpen crisis, contract leverage shouldn’t be an issue. Of course, that’s a few steps past this pyramid of Hall’s.
“The higher you go, the harder it is to take the next step,” he said.
So history screams.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
At least Belkin wins in courtroom
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The initial reaction is to shudder. Steve Belkin as outright owner of not one but two Atlanta sports franchises? Why not hand the Braves to Donald Sterling and the Falcons to the Bidwills while we’re at it?
The secondary response is to perform a reality check. And to ask: Would Balkin’ Belkin be any worse than the addled status quo? Would having a single owner, even a wrong-headed one, be any more embarrassing than a partnership that couldn’t stay partnered and, far worse, can’t even execute a severance?
What happened last summer — Belkin’s attempt to block the Joe Johnson sign-and-trade; Billy Knight’s photographed refusal to shake Belkin’s hand — was sobering. The judicial ruling issued Friday was, for the remaining members of Atlanta Spirit LLC, utterly mortifying. They wanted to buy out Belkin, who apparently wanted to be bought out. Now it has been decreed that Belkin has the legal right to buy what they didn’t intend to sell. The minority owner has, at least for the moment, out-litigated the majority. Is this a great country or what?
For the sake of argument, let’s assume the dispirited Atlanta Spirit can’t find a higher court willing to overturn the Maryland judge’s ruling. Let’s assume Belkin winds up with the Hawks and the Thrashers and Philips Arena. What might happen then?
Well, Billy Knight would be out of a job. (If you won’t shake a man’s hand, how can you work for him?) The Thrashers’ spiraling payroll would surely be reduced. The Hawks probably wouldn’t be in the market for any big-ticket free agents, given that a disagreement over a big-ticket free agent triggered this whole mess. And all of that sounds bad, yes. Here again, pesky reality intrudes.
The Thrashers, in business since 1999, haven’t yet reached the playoffs. The Hawks haven’t qualified for a postseason since 1999. The Thrashers spent big last season — so big that their general manager guaranteed the playoffs — and fell two points short. The Hawks’ GM keeps burning lofty draft picks on swingmen and just traded away the guy who would become the NBA’s Most Improved Player. If this represents organizational success, what constitutes failure?
Belkin, as has been noted, is an odd duck. He seems to want to own a team for the sheer privilege of ownership. He lives in Boston and, in the happier days before the partnership fragmented, showed no inclination to move here. He attended only a handful of games. He evinced little interest in the day-to-day running of the Hawks and Thrashers until getting exercised over the Joe Johnson courtship. (With the distance of hindsight, it must be said that two draft picks plus Boris Diaw plus $70 million does seem a trifle much to pay for any player other than LeBron James or Shaquille O’Neal.)
Those who continue to work for the Hawks and Thrashers believe Belkin unchecked would be an untrammeled fiasco, but it isn’t as if those who work for the Hawks and Thrashers have lifted their franchises to such great heights. Belkin’s former partners have the benefit of being cheery fellows and, in the case of the Gearons and Rutherford Seydel, longtime Atlantans. Alas, having your heart (and body) in the right place isn’t nearly enough.
The former partners stand exposed as hopelessly naïve — for having embraced Belkin in the first place, for having believed this litigious man would go away quietly. In the bottom-line world of professional sports, are wide-eyed naifs apt to make the sort of nuanced decisions that generate championships?
Steve Belkin would almost certainly be the sort of owner — cheap and distant and arrogant — no team wants. But if the alternative is a bunch of nice guys who couldn’t bring themselves to fire Mike Woodson for losing 85 of his first 100 games, is that any better? At least Belkin knows how to win in a courtroom. The nice guys haven’t indicated they can win at anything involving pro sports, or that they ever will.
Permalink | Comments (42) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley, Thrashers / NHL
