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Friday, June 16, 2006
Losing arrives with a thud for Braves
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
These are uncharted waters. The Braves as we’ve come to know them have never been this far back, have never seemed so addled. We know the Braves know how to handle winning, but a team that has won forever can’t possibly know how to handle losing.
And that’s why we’re seeing what we’re seeing — hitters who’ve posted the third-most strikeouts in the National League; a bullpen that has no reliables and therefore no roles; a rotation in which only one pitcher has a winning record; a defense that has yielded more unearned runs than any NL team except Cincinnati. We’re seeing a team that is both trying too hard and doing too little, and we’re hearing indications that the strains are showing.
Mike Remlinger, who can be prickly, threw a ball away and lost a game in Florida this week, and afterward he hinted that Chipper Jones should have overridden the bad throw by making like Stretch McCovey. This was so un-Braves-like as to generate headlines in this paper, and to make Bobby Cox — who maintained he still didn’t know the particulars of Remlinger’s “Ask Chipper if it was catchable” quote — to issue this pronouncement of his own: “We don’t point fingers in the newspaper.”
They haven’t, no. But maybe they do now. Maybe the indignity of playing for the league’s biggest winner and seeing it morph into a shockingly inept loser is changing the dynamics. Maybe the Braves, who have long prided themselves on running a better clubhouse than anyone else, are discovering that enough losses — after Friday’s perfunctory loss to Boston, they’ve dropped 15 of 18 — will make even the Sunshine Boys turn surly.
We come now to a point in a Braves’ season that we haven’t known since Jeff Francouer was in first grade. We come to the point where a team must decide if it’s going to coalesce or cut and run. Other teams reach such lines of demarcation on a regular basis, but things have gone so smoothly here for so outrageously long that the Braves haven’t ever felt the chilly fingers of desperation.
“I fear the young guys might not know how to react,” said Chipper Jones, an older guy who hasn’t finished anywhere but first as a big-leaguer. Not since 1990 have the Braves been so far behind as to have no hope, but they’re close. The Mets are all but uncatchable atop the East, and to claim the wild card the Braves would have to pass exactly half the 16-team league.
We come to that point where you wonder if the Braves remember that they’re still the Braves, that they bear not just the expectation of winning but the responsibility to carry themselves in a way befitting baseball’s most admired organization. It’s one thing to lose because you’re not good enough, quite another to lose because you decide winning is just too hard.
“They will always be professionals,” Cox said Friday. “If not, they won’t play — that’s for damn sure. This is where we find out who wants to play.”
Asked if he was mad, Cox said: “A little bit. I’m mad at certain situations. You can’t get mad if you know guys are trying their best.”
We’ll soon learn what the Braves themselves think of this team and its chances. The trading deadline is 6 1/2 weeks away, and it’s not possible to know if the Braves would be buyers or sellers. “We will be one or the other,” John Schuerholz said. “But I have to tell you that [the notion of dumping players] is a foreign concept.”
There’s no such thing as a pretty end to a splendid run. When you win for a long time, losing always arrives with a thud. These past three weeks have been so wretched as to make you believe the Braves have misplaced every insight gleaned over the past 15 years. There mightn’t be enough time or enough talent to make even a wild-card run, but there’s enough of both for these guys to show the pride that should be sewn into their famous uniform. If they’re going to go down, at least go down fighting. At least go down like Braves.
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Stricker dooms Tiger’s weekend
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Mamaroneck, N.Y. – With one swing of the sharply angled club, his 69th of the day, Steve Stricker made U.S. Open history, as some golf historians put it Friday. With that swing of his sand-iron, out of a bunker by the 9th green, he effectively eliminated Tiger Woods from the U.S. Open Championship at Winged Foot.
Tiger missed the cut! That was the news of the day in Westchester County. Woods had never missed a 36-hole cut in all the majors he has played as a professional, here or abroad. Thus was snuffed out the major news source of this 106th national championship of golf, smothered for days beneath the deluge of exhilaration over Woods’ return to the game, and the drawn-out mourning in print over the death of Earl Woods, his father, nine weeks ago.
Check here the expansive comment of the defending champion, Michael Campbell of New Zealand, who also missed the cut, playing in Woods’ group. “I mean, God,” he said, “you’ve got to give him credit for actually turning up.”
Stricker had been the first player off the tee Friday, beginning at par and plying an even course into the 9th hole, where he found himself in a greenside bunker. He had started on the back nine, and at this juncture found his way back to par. The line to the pin was at a hard angle, leaving him little green to the target.
“Truthfully, I was just trying to get it on the green,” he said. “I caught it perfect, and it checked and rolled right down [to the hole].”
Actually, the ball took a couple of bounces and rolled straight in. Stricker was now 1 under par. Playing five groups behind him, Woods was then 10 under par, and even under the USGA championship rule that allows any player 10 strokes or closer from the lead after 36 holes to continue play, he was closed out – unless he converted a birdie somewhere on the way. Instead, he bogeyed the 8th and for all intents and purposes, surrendered on the 9th where he bogeyed again. He was now 12 over par, and unless the field ahead of him was stricken with some dreadful affliction, Woods was done, and he knew it.
As he plodded heavily down the 9th fairway, some pained voice rang out, “Thanks, Tiger. Thank you, Tiger,” with the ring of sincere appreciation, not a sarcastic dismissal.
It had been a strange quietly peaceful gallery, barely a sound, save for the shuffling of feet and the occasional collision of bodies. None of the usual cries of exhortation, “C’mon, Tiger!” “Go get ‘em, Tiger,” for they knew it was done.
Tiger himself pronounced his own benediction later, when he said, “I was not ready for golf.” His extended home on water, a spacious yacht called “Privacy,” is docked on Long Island Sound, and there is the prospect that it is there he may be found the next few days. The last lingering sign of his entourage was that of his caddie, Steve Williams, in his short trousers, disappearing into the players’ parking lot, Woods’ Buick golf bag across his back.
On the other hand, there was rejuvenation in the story of Steve Stricker, though one would hardly single out Winged Foot as a course to relocate your game. Once Stricker ranked fourth on the PGA Tour, and still later, won the World Match Play Championships at Carlsbad. But then came recession, and after his three-year exemption that came with the Match Play Championship ran out in 2004, he has been without a tour card. The gossip was that after winning the match play title, he switched equipment connections, and he and his new gear never hit it off.
Stricker is a native of Wisconsin, 39 years old and a player on the PGA Tour since 1990. Once one of the brighter prospects on the tour, it all got away from him after the most accomplished victory of his career. Here today, gone tomorrow, as they say, and the mystery is, where did it go?
“I am in a good position,” he said, “but, you know, I need to work on some things on the range, some things I didn’t do so well coming in.”
When last seen, Stricker was toiling away in the unseasonably hot sun on the practice range. Tiger Woods was on his way to no one knew where, but a few days on “Privacy” sounded like a comforting destination.
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