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Monday, August 7, 2006
Time and another game slip away
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The Braves insist they can reach the postseason, and technically and mathematically they still can. But here’s a sobering snippet of math: The team that has made two trades to bolster its avowed playoff run just lost the opener of a series against a team that dumped an All-Star outfielder and a starting pitcher and is clearly in rebuilding mode. And Philadelphia stands three games ahead of the Braves.
“We’re definitely in it,” said Jeff Francoeur, speaking before Monday’s game. But if they’re alive, where’s Philadelphia?
“If they’re in it, we’re in it,” said Charlie Manuel, the Phillies’ manager. “Anything can happen — the Dodgers have proven that. They lost 13 [of 14], and now they’ve won nine in a row.”
Yeah, it’s a funny game. But surely Philadelphia can’t see itself as a playoff team — not with its handful of developing young pitchers and its four-man bench — and at this late date, it’s hard to imagine the Braves as one, either.
“We’re good enough to pull it off,” manager Bobby Cox, among the more optimistic men who have ever lived, said Monday afternoon. “We’ve got some pieces in the bullpen, and we’ll get Chipper back in a week, and Giles is really starting to hit.”
Francoeur: “If you look at our August schedule, it’s very favorable. We don’t play a team that’s above .500 [the rest of the month], and you have to like that.”
You would. But those other middling teams can look at the Braves and see not the colossus that won those 14 consecutive division titles but a flawed aggregation that has itself been above .500 only 13 days this season. “They’ve had trouble with their starting pitching and trouble at the back end of their bullpen,” Manuel said. “And they have a lot of young players playing at the major-league level.”
When the story of this season is finally written, the fortnight just completed could well stand as the determinant. The Braves had gone 14-5 to bracket the All-Star break and had climbed into a fourth-place tie in the wild-card standings. Two weeks later, they’re tied for ninth. It isn’t the deficit — 5 1/2 games behind Cincinnati — that’s so daunting; it’s the number of teams the Braves would have to catch and pass, and roughly half of them are going to win every single night.
“There’s a sense of urgency now,” Francoeur said. “We can’t have any more 2-3 or 3-4 homestands. … We have to put ourselves in position for September. These next two weeks will be big.”
And this Big Homestand began with a 9-6 loss. So much for seizing the day.
The Braves of recent vintage might have extricated themselves from this. (Then again, those Braves were never so flimsy as to be 51-60 with 51 games to play.) What stands to be this team’s ultimate undoing is what touched off and fueled the great run of division titles — starting pitching. You can’t fashion a 10-game streak if you have to win every game 10-9. The Braves have only three wins by a starter in their past 17 games, two of those from John Smoltz.
Said Manuel: “If they had two or three Smoltzes over there, things would be a lot different.”
They used to have three or four such pitchers. Now they’re down to one, and he can start only 10 or so games the rest of the way. And Horacio Ramirez, who has become a source of much exasperation, hurt himself again Monday, suffering “a soft-tissue injury” to the middle finger of his throwing hand. (Just how much “soft tissue” is there in a middle finger?)
One of those teams that just hopped above the Braves is Houston. The Astros can throw Roger Clemens, Roy Oswalt and Andy Pettitte in succession. Forced to choose between that august rotation and the Braves’, who would you pick to make an eight-week run to October?
Even Cox, the raging optimistic, conceded, “We don’t have that many [games left]. We’ve got to run the table.”
One more game ticked off Monday night, the Braves losing for the fourth time in five days. Time isn’t on their side. Truth to tell, nothing is on their side.
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