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Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Braves need pitching now, not later
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
A week ago, Braves president Terry McGuirk said: “Everyone feels like we’re going to be a playoff team.”
Allow me to introduce myself: I’m the guy who doesn’t feel this is going to be a playoff team.
Since starting the season 7-1, the Braves are 26-26. They just lost three of four to the sub-.500 Marlins in a series where John Smoltz and Tim Hudson worked and Dontrelle Willis didn’t. What we’re seeing is what more than a few folks figured would happen the longer the season went: The starting rotation has been reduced to Smoltzie and Huddy and Hope You Get Lucky.
A telling stat: In their 26 starts, Smoltz and Hudson have worked at least six innings while yielding three or fewer earned runs — a “quality start,” in the vernacular — 21 times. The rest of the rotation has produced quality starts 11 times in 34 outings. The Braves got away with it so long as Smoltz and Hudson won every single time, but Hudson has lost three of four and has seen his ERA, which was 1.40 after a stellar April, climb to 3.09.
Kyle Davies started Wednesday and yielded five runs before he recorded nine outs. “We were down five before it ever got started,” manager Bobby Cox said, and that’s what happens too often to teams with a shaky rotation. (It is, by way of contrast, what almost never happened to the Braves from 1991 through 2002.)
And here’s the worst part: A shaky rotation tends to get shakier as the games and innings mount. The Braves are counting on the reactivated Lance Cormier — “We hope he can pitch the way he did last year,” Cox said — to make a disproportionate impact. But how, you ask, did Cormier fare as a starter last season? He was 2-4 with a 4.31 ERA.
Already Mark Redman has come and gone, and already Davies has seen his ERA ascend to 5.31. You can make the case that the Braves have been unlucky — “All our [starting] pitchers aren’t here,” Cox said — but how realistic was it to hope that Mike Hampton, who hadn’t pitched since July 2005, would be the same guy he was? (As it happened, Hampton remains the same guy he was in one respect: He’s hurt again.)
Too many questions had to be answered correctly for this rotation to carry its weight. Too many fair-to-middling pitchers had to turn into 15-game winners. And now, with 60 of 162 games gone, we see what the Braves must do if they’re to play beyond Game No. 162: Find another reliable starter, and they can’t wait until the July 31 trade deadline to do it.
The Braves ran neck-and-neck with the Mets deep into May, but New York has begun to open a gap. (And the Mets figure to get Pedro Martinez back at some point.) For a time, it seemed the wild card would hail from the NL East, but San Diego and Arizona and Los Angeles, all of which pitch better than the Braves, have pulled ahead of the hometown club. The Braves have enough good players to stay above .500, but without a stouter rotation they can’t hope to run off 12 of 15 and separate themselves from teams that can deploy a stout starter most every night.
“We all know what we need to do,” Davies said. “Trust me, we want to win as much as anybody else. I want to go seven, eight, nine innings every time and give our team a chance to win.”
Reality check: Davies has worked four quality starts in 11 tries. On Wednesday, he was gone after five innings, his team chasing yet another game.
There are things to like about these Braves: The bullpen is superb and the hitting is robust. But we saw for more than a decade why baseball men insist that starting pitching is the game’s greatest determinant, and we see now why the Braves as constituted will fall short of the postseason.
A team can overhaul only so many five-run deficits. A team cannot subsist over a six-month trek when three of every five games are shrouded in uncertainty.
Permalink | Comments (134) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Donovan fiasco will blow over
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
There is way too much fuss over this Billy Donovan thing. He finally came to his senses.
That’s all.
What do these people have in common? Lon Kruger. Rick Pitino. Leonard Hamilton. John Calipari. P.J. Carlesimo. If you haven’t guessed, they all lost their minds by leaving wonderful jobs in college basketball to become woeful NBA coaches.
With Donovan pulling a Bobby Cremins by orchestrating a return back to the University of Florida after leaving to take over the Orlando Magic, everybody is better off.
The Gators are better off, because they retain the best coach they ever had in any sport (That Spurrier guy only won one national championship to Donovan’s two). The Magic are better off, because they don’t have to hire an overmatched college coach they’ll have to fire in two years. Donovan is better off, because his heart is with the college game instead of pro game.
Contrary to popular belief, this won’t hurt Donovan in the long run. So many coaches have pulled a Bobby Cremins over the past 14 years - from Glen Mason to Bill Belichick to Gregg Marshall — that everybody has become immune to this now.
Not only that, there are so many coaching changes in the NBA after a given year that somebody will seek Donovan again. He is only 42, and NBA general managers are running out of fresh names.
Donovan will be fine. So will the Gators and the Magic.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
