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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Braves’ season lost, but future can be saved
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
For 15 years they had to manage success, and they did it expertly. Now the Braves must manage the first real failure in nearly a generation, and there’s a way to do that, too. They can begin by going back to the beginning. They can begin by going out and finding more pitching.
They don’t need to be making any trades in the forlorn hope that there’s a wild-card run in this bedraggled squad. The Braves began play Wednesday night with the 14th-best record in a 16-team league. There’s no way any GM worth his Blackberry trades a prospect like Jarrod Saltalamacchia in the off-chance that some veteran import will energize a team. Fred McGriff was the exception, not the rule. And the 1993 Braves, even without McGriff, were a heck of a lot better than this bunch.
On the contrary, the Braves need to find more Saltalamacchias. This team got good because of pitching and prospects. Unless somebody extravagantly rich and foolish buys this team — Mark Cuban isn’t believed to be among the bidders — the Braves aren’t going to get good again by buying the highest-priced free agents. They’ll have to do it the way they did it in 1991. The good news: The guy who oversaw that transformation is here still.
Even with his team 14 1/2 games behind the Mets and eight games out of the wild-card spot, John Schuerholz insisted Wednesday he hasn’t abandoned all hope for 2006. “We’re going to do everything we can to fix this team and stay in the race,� he said. “If it becomes painfully obvious we can’t do that, we’ll go to work on the ’07 team.�
It’s time now. Though Schuerholz still looks to prop up his lousy bullpen — “We’re working on it,� he said — no reliever short of Mariano Rivera is going to make a difference here. The big news Wednesday was that Bobby Cox reassigned Jorge Sosa to relief, but it’s hard to imagine a 1-9 starter being reborn as a lockdown closer.
The lack of pitching, starting and otherwise, has killed this team. The offense, believe it not, is statistically about average. The team ERA is the league’s third-worst. That right there would seem to dismiss the week’s non-story, meaning a possible trade of John Smoltz. When you have a bad rotation and a worse bullpen, can you part with a man who’s a splendid starter and who was, lest we forget, the best closer in franchise history? (Say Mike Hampton returns next season and stabilizes the rotation. Might the Braves ask Smoltz — who told reporters Tuesday he just wants “whatever is best for the team� — to reconsider his I’m-a-starter stance? They might.)
Said Schuerholz: “If you measure my track record, my history is to accumulate pitching, not to dismiss it.�
Truth to tell, the Braves’ pitching has been running short for three years. The Tim Hudson trade of December 2004 was the first move toward rebalancing, but more are needed. They got away with Sosa-as-starter last season, but two such years were too much to ask. If the Braves could find a big-time arm at the trading deadline — or, more likely, over the winter — it might be worth parting with any everyday veteran. Even Chipper Jones, who’s not the player he was three years ago. Even Andruw Jones, whose contract expires after the 2007 season.
Keep Jeff Francoeur. Keep Brian McCann and Saltalamacchia. They’re the future. Find as much pitching as you can, then go find some more. That approach won’t be nearly as sexy as trying to swing a deal for Albert Pujols or some other unattainable All-Star, but that measured approach set these last 15 years in motion. And the Braves, in case you’re wondering, much preferred those 15 years to the one they’re suffering through.
“When you have surprising disappointment, you try to manage the organization past and through it,â€? Schuerholz said. “That’s so you don’t have to endure it again. It only takes one experience like this to know that we don’t like it. … This is like being kicked in the shins sharply every day.â€?
And here he actually smiled. “My shins hurt.�
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American soccer flourishes in its own way
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
One thing you could never sell Phil Woosnam short on was optimism. And sincerity. If he said it, he believed it, so it was that as we sat over breakfast - or maybe it was lunch - he looked me in the eye and he said, “Twenty or twenty-five years from now soccer will have taken this country by storm. It will be bigger than professional football.”
Woosnam was speaking from a position of authority, then commissioner of the revamped and refreshened North American Soccer League. I’m guessing at the year, probably the early 1970s, for after just two seasons coaching the Atlanta Chiefs, Woosnam became commissioner and nursed the NASL through some critical times.
He had come to Atlanta from England in 1967, bedecked in a wreath of titles - general manager, head coach and a playing member of the original Chiefs, pennant winners and first national champion from Atlanta in any professional league. Twice the Chiefs beat the major league Manchester City team of England in exhibitions, after the Manchester GM had sneered at the Chiefs as “Fourth Division.” (That’s bad.) Woosnam had been a star on West Ham and Aston Villa, premium teams in the English league, a modest lad from a small town in Wales who went to the city and found celebrity.
Once in commissioner’s chair, he was able to attract some aging performers from the old country, and for awhile in the early ’70s they were filling stadiums. Later Pele would come, and Beckenbauer, and George Best, but it was like dwelling on dessert before the main course, and it didn’t last.
But Woosnam stayed with his dream.
Soccer did flourish in the USA, but on the playground and school levels, not major league. “Soccer mom” became a new word to bandy about. Kids developed in high school, but that was the end of the line. There was little inducement to go to college. Real hot stars had to leave the country to find a game.
“It has done well in high school and college,” Woosnam said the other day. “It has spread, and our national teams have done well. The women have done the best, though. They’ve won two World Cups. The men have made it to the World Cup five times, once as the host team, and I think they could do well this time.”
As of the moment, their highlight has been a tie with Italy, though they yet have to score a goal on their own. One of the Italian players got twisted about and deflected the ball into his own goal, thank you very much.
Well, pro football is still stands unthreatened. Soccer hasn’t spread like a swarm of locusts across the fruited plain. The North American League got a second wind in Atlanta when Ted Turner’s television empire took the wheel in 1980. The Chiefs returned to Atlanta Stadium after taking flings in other venues, but soccer wasn’t selling and sometime down the road the NASL breathed its last breath in Atlanta.
“Maybe I was a little premature,” Woosnam said, “but you never say never. Good things are happening. Women players have jumped ahead of the men. We’ve got to quit letting our good players go overseas. You understand why, that’s where the shekels are.”
While soccer struggles for its place in the sun over here, it is the international pastime. Anybody can play. This a case in which size isn’t important. Nations no larger than some of our counties are kicking the ball around on the same field with world political and economic powers. Togo, Costa Rica, Trinidad & Tobago, Croatia, and the beat goes on. Kids can pick up the game on the street without benefit of ball. Roll up a bunch of rags in the shape of a ball, start kicking it around and you have a game. Some of the stars have come out of the most destitute of situations. It can be one poor kid’s ticket out of a wilderness.
One thing never changes about soccer - the game. Baseball, football, basketball are forever changing rules and playing conditions. Soccer always has been the same, always will be. A plain and simple game with one objective: Kick the ball in the other team’s net. It’s probably the most exhausting team game of them all, 90 minutes in a sprint with intermittent entanglements. And God help the player who scores an own goal.
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Mavs’ choke job recalls ‘96 Series
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
The Miami Heat didn’t just win the NBA championship. The Dallas Mavericks just lost it.
This was the biggest choke in team sports, since the Braves’ silly collapse against Jim Leyritz and the New York Yankees during the 1996 World Series.
Just like those Braves, the Heat was up 2-0 in a seven-game series. Just like those Braves, the Mavs had their Leyritz moment (those Braves blew a 6-0 lead midway through Game 4 that would have given them a 3-1 advantage in the series, and the Mavs blew a 13-point lead with barely six minutes left in Game 3 that would have placed them a win from a title).
Then both teams lost in Game 6 after normally clutch players suddenly weren’t clutch anymore.
Then again, it’s difficult to play with one hand around your throat.
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