Gather ‘round, as did the Braves full squad Monday morning in an outfield tribal meeting before the first total workout of spring.
Before the drilling – and the Braves would open with what seemed to be an especially long session on Day One – there would be the messaging. Each baseball season has to begin with a message, a variation on a rah-rah theme. Braves manager Brian Snitker doesn’t really play rah-rah lead guitar, but he can lay down a subtler base line. He’ll get you ready for spring in his own way.
Yes, the expectations for this season are rightfully tempered.
Sure, we’ve heard it all before.
But it is the first full-squad workout of spring. So, you can join the circle, too, and take the manager’s message as a personal wake-up call for another baseball season.
“It’s a little different camp, I think. It’s a young camp, exciting. I told them about how excited I was,” said the 62-year-old baseball lifer who in general throws off all the sparks of a rubber-soled shoe.
A lot of changes around here, the skipper told them in the opening address. A lot of new coaches with new approaches, along with the new GM. There’ll be a big push on the analytics side, and real effort to drill deeply into the numbers, to frack, if necessary, and then share the intelligence with each player. For those lifers like Snitker, he admitted it will be teaching an old dog how to do calculus. Everybody’s got to keep up.
But also, there is in play, Sniter promised, some very tried and true tenets. Ones that had served the Braves quite well.
“I told them 27 years ago, this process works,” the 42-year Brave said. “I was a part of it. We’re headed in the right direction and it’s an exciting time to be an Atlanta Brave right now.”
“I saw how this works, how we built this thing from within and I was on the ground floor of that. I saw that’s how you do it – the strength of our minor leagues was a big part. There are a lot of similarities now and then (the dawn of the 1990s).”
“I think they could see I was excited about where we are going, excited about being here, excited about this group.”
But also, the manager told his guys, “I’m going to treat everybody fairly, but I’m not going to treat you the same as maybe the guy next to you.”
Not if the next guy is raking, or the guy next to him is throwing gas.
It’s only the first day of full workouts, but there seemed a little keener edge to this spring than Braves springs past. A renewed sense of purpose. A real distaste for compromise.
Welcome to Camp Darwin, six weeks of intense athletic natural selection.
Baseball is never going to prepare with the ferocity of football. Spring training never will make anyone forget Bear Bryant running his Texas A&M Aggies through hell and back in Junction, Texas.
There’s no Oklahoma drills in baseball. Darn little puking, either.
That said, Monday was an honest work day, with maybe even a little overtime thrown in. It seemed to get the fellas’ attention.
One expert witness was new Hall of Famer Chipper Jones, all dressed out in his Braves play clothes and on hand to instruct where needed.
“There’s definitely a little change in attitude around here,” Jones said. “You can see it in just the way the coaching staff is putting together spring training. It’s a lot more organized. There’s a lot more delegation of responsibility. It’s got guys in their spots to get their work done and get out of there.”
“It’s a free-for-all,” Jones said. “There are people who had big league jobs last year who need to come in here and play for their spot.”
And very possibly the last Brave to see Cooperstown for a while really wants it that way.
“Guys need to know this team and this organization is tired of the last few years,” he said.
OK, now you’re all ready for spring. Bring it on.
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