DEL.ICIO.USMLB: ATLANTA BRAVES
Braves’ offseason of mediocrity
Team with myriad needs has failed to make splash in free-agent market
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Not so long ago, the Atlanta Braves were not merely a team.
To players, the club was a sort of Valhalla, the ultimate destination for prospects and free agents alike. The payroll was high, a Cy Young winner seemed to pitch most every night and the manager ran the club like Will Rogers. October baseball was a birthright, with the team winning an unprecedented 14 consecutive division titles.
AP
Braves were the reported front-runners to acquire San Diego pitcher Jake Peavy. A deal that would’ve sent Yunel Escobar to the Padres along with two other Braves was eventually nixed by Atlanta.
AP
The Braves were on the verge of bringing back shortstop Rafael Furcal when he turned and re-signed with the Dodgers for more money.
The Braves settled on a trade and acquired pitcher Javier Vazquez (12-16 last season) from the Chicago White Sox.
Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images
Japanese ace Kenshin Kawakami, a 33-year-old right-hander, has reportedly agreed to a three-year deal to join the Braves.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
That those Braves no longer play here was most dramatically demonstrated last week when the unthinkable happened: John Smoltz, a career Brave of 21 years and one of the franchise’s most visible and popular players, bolted for the Boston Red Sox after a contract squabble.
While the team’s fortunes have been falling for the past three seasons — Atlanta lost 90 games last year — the fact that Smoltz would be allowed to leave has infuriated a large segment of the team’s fan base. A petition to fire general manager Frank Wren is circulating on the Internet. One unnamed fan has listed his Smoltz trading card on eBay, auctioning off what he calls “the heart and soul of one used Atlanta Braves fan.”
Is the team still the ultimate destination?
“It really is not that anymore,” said former club president Stan Kasten.
This is a story of the complexities of operating a team with an absentee corporate owner, a game with a skewed economic system and a mid-sized market that, after witnessing one of the longest sustained run of excellence, has soured on a few seasons of mediocrity. There was encouraging news Saturday that the club was close to signing Japanese ace Kenshin Kawakami after a spirited multi-team recruiting battle.
But Smoltz was just the latest player to snub the club this winter. While the team had boasted it would have up to $40-milion to invest in the free-agent market, finding someone to take their money had become suprisingly problematic.
Free agent pitcher A.J. Burnett turned down an $80-million offer to sign a comparable offer with the New York Yankees, saying he wanted to play closer to his Maryland home.
Braves pitcher Mike Hampton left for a lesser offer in Houston.
Free-agent shortstop Rafael Furcal, a popular former Brave, appeared close to returning only to have his agent change direction late in negotiations and arrange a similar deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
A promising trade with San Diego for star pitcher Jake Peavy fell through. Free-agent pitcher Derek Lowe last week visited the Braves brass to explore his coming here at the height of the Smoltz furor, which could not have left a positive impression.
Third baseman Chipper Jones, another career Brave, reacted like a man looking up at his own scaffold.
“The business of baseball goes on, and no matter how loyal you are as a player, no matter how much you sacrificed as a player for a particular organization, there comes a time when that organization wants to go a different direction,” Jones said last week. “And that time is now for Smoltzy, and I would imagine that my time is not too far off in the distant future.”
In the meantime, Braves blogs and chatrooms have been bursting into flames. While some fans hold Smoltz culpable for leaving over what came down to a $3-million discrepancy — the former Cy Young winner has banked over $130 million over his career — the majority see this as the final thud in the Braves’ fall from grace.
“I hereby certify that the Atlanta Braves of Major League Baseball died on the 8th day of January, 2009, of Baseball Syndrome, a complex disease of ingratitude, incompetence, and disloyalty,” wrote DCBrave.
“I’ve forgiven them for a lot of what I thought were mistakes over the years,” lexbrave wrote. “But this I don’t think was a mistake. I know it was a mistake. It is [in my opinion] the one unforgivable sin.”
“I feel so bad, I do not even have a sarcastic remark to make,” wrote Ed Glennon.
For his part, Wren, the team’s general manager, pointed to the complexity of the situation.
“Anybody that sits in this chair will tell you the most difficult decision you make are with aging stars, plain and simple,” Wren said. “Because you respect them, you want them to be a part of your organization forever, but the reality is, they’re getting older and they’re not the same.”
How did we arrive here? Braves management, having built a perennial winner so recently, just didn’t wake up brain-dead one morning.
The answer is complex. For starters, the club’s Denver-based ownership, Liberty Media Corp., has won over few fans, a faceless cost-conscious company in the place of free-spending Atlantan Ted Turner. And even Turner had pulled away from free agency before selling the team in 2007.
“The city is great. The stadium is great. [Manager] Bobby Cox is great,” said Kasten, the former Braves executive who is now president of the Washington Nationals. “I think all of those things will continue to be an attraction [to free agents]. But there are other things that are happening. There is much more of a movement [throughout baseball] toward young players and development than there ever was before.”
And if the team is having trouble spending money, the Braves are not alone. The New York Yankees, trying to make a splash with a new stadium opening next year, have already spent $423.5 million on free agents this winter — more than the other 31 teams combined.
This offseason with the addition of Kawakami, a Braves team with myriad needs has signed one free agent: backup catcher Dave Ross, at $3 million. They also traded for pitcher Javier Vazquez, who had a losing record (12-16) for the Chicago White Sox last season. If this seems like reluctant shopping, remember baseball is the first of the professional sports to conduct an offseason during the ongoing recession.
“No one alive that been through these circumstances in sports, so we’re all just kind of guessing and doing our best,” Kasten said.
With the Braves televised games no longer available nationally after TBS phased back to regional broadcasting in 2007, the franchise — long known as “America’s Team” — might have also lost one of its best marketing tools.
“Friends and families could watch every night, no matter where they were from, whether they were from here or from the Dominican [Republic] or wherever,” retired Braves broadcaster Pete Van Wieren said. “It was a big plus for the organization to have that. … I think that was a factor they may not have realized how strong it was.”
The Braves report to spring training in only 27 days and while their roster is hardly complete, Wren’s options will shrink by the day. Among those watching over his shoulder is one more senior Brave, whose sore elbow may or may not allow him to pitch one more season.
“When I look at this team and where it is right now, of course there are concerns,” Tom Glavine said. “I have concerns like any fan does about what hasn’t happened for this team this winter, but I think for me it’s more of a personal thing. My closest friend in the game was my teammate and now he won’t be my teammate if I do come back.”
A city can relate.
— Staff writers Carroll Rogers and David O’Brien contributed to this report.
Services »
