The Atlanta Braves began their final series before the All-Star break a half-game out of first place, and here we should remove our gaze from individual conifers to behold Ye Olde Forest. Forget the “a half-game out” part. (With Friday’s loss, it became 1-1/2 games.) Note instead the bit about “first place.”
Over the past three seasons, the Braves finished an aggregate 74-1/2 games out of first. In 2018, they’ve been within 1-1/2 games of the division lead every day since April 28. Since May 2, they’ve held first place for all but eight days. If the playoffs began today -- they won’t, but let’s pretend -- they would qualify. And if, when the team broke spring training in March, you’d have asked their manager if he’d have taken 50-plus wins at the break, would he …
“I would have said, ‘I’m all in,’ ” Brian Snitker said Friday afternoon, fairly leaping at the question. “It’s similar – I know it happened differently – to that last 10-game road trip. We knew that was going to be rough. If somebody had asked me, ‘Do you want to go .500?,’ I’d have said, ‘No, I want to go 6-4.’ But if you’d have said we would go .500, I’d have said, ‘OK, not bad’ – with the teams that we played.”
Then: “If somebody had told me at the end of March that we’d be sitting here at the All-Star break and we’re one of the better teams in the National League and we’re right there in the hunt, I’d have been all in.”
As an audience, we – and that’s my hand you see raised – have begun to pick nits: The hitting has slipped, half the rotation is on the disabled list and the bullpen is mediocre at best. All of that is true, but none of it obscures a greater truth: This team has been way better than any of us dreamed, its manager included.
Did Snitker see this coming? “Not really, no,” he said. “There were individual questions, team questions, in spring training. You never know how your young guys are going to respond – young guys who don’t have that big baseball card, and we had a bunch of them. You never know when those guys are going to click, when they’re going to get it, how they’re going to adjust, how they’re going to adjust to the league adjusting to them.
“I’ve been very pleased with where a lot of these individuals are, where they are as a team, that grit they show, the never-out-of-a-game type of attitude that we have. I don’t know that we were a team that had a lot of years behind us and enough experience (for us to have) a real good feel to know where this was going to go when all this started.”
Now we do. We saw glimpses on opening day, when the Braves overrode a five-run deficit to beat Philadelphia on Nick Markakis’ walk-off home run. (The same Nick Markakis hit three homers in the 2015 season, eight last year.) They haven’t spent a day under .500. They won their first three series. They started well and got better.
Snitker: “This has kind of ramped up sooner than I thought we might. I thought we could be competitive. I thought we’d be a lot better team this year. That was the one part in spring training we knew was going to be better – that we’re going to be more athletic and this was going be a lot better defensive club. Those were two givens.”
Then: “Offensively we didn’t know, and the same with the starters (meaning the rotation) and some of those young guys. We didn’t know where they were going to be. I like where the offense and where the pitching has been. We have a lot of young guys carrying a big load. A lot of guys have taken some significant steps forward. It’s all good.”
In the grand scheme, it’s better than good. At the All-Star break in 2016, the Braves were 31-58 and Snitker, who’d replaced the fired Fredi Gonzalez on an interim basis, could barely find four warm bodies to fill out an infield. This team – with its robust quartet of Freddie Freeman, who’s 28; Ozzie Albies, 21, and Dansby Swanson and Johan Camargo, both 24 – has both a future and a present.
The past three weeks haven’t been so hot. As of Saturday morning, the Braves had lost 12 of 20. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. Three years ago, we wondered if they would ever get good again. Four months ago, we wondered if the 2018 edition could sniff .500. This young bunch has made us recalibrate. We’re seeing real baseball now. We might be seeing it in October.
Said Snitker: “All these close games, we’ve been a hit away or a pitch away. It’s kind of a new stress level. That’s part of it, too. I know from being here before (as a coach) when we were chasing the division and the wild card, you get to September and all you want to do is go to the ballpark. You just can’t wait to get there. All you think about is that next game. It’s stressful, but it’s a fun time. I’m hopeful we experience that as a team, too.”
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