He set the alarm for 4 a.m. His eyes opened at 3 a.m.
“I couldn’t go back to sleep,” Fredi Gonzalez said Friday.
Too many things rolled through his head. The camp schedule. The words he would say to his pitchers before their first workout. The speech he would give next week after the balance of the roster reports. What happened last season. What may happen this season.
So Gonzalez arose early, when most of us were rolling over, processed his thoughts and drove to a nearby coffee house to meet with Rick Slate, the Braves’ strength-and-conditioning coach.
“There’s some characters at Starbucks at 4:20,” Gonzalez said. “The same guys are there. They look at you kind of funny when you walk in at four. It’s like, ‘Are you coming in from going out, or are you just going out now?’ They see if you’re stumbling.”
Seems like the perfect time for a sports transition.
Will the Braves’ evolve into something special this season, or will they stumble. Or maybe somewhere in between — again?
It’s spring training. It’s the time of hope. No team has lost a game. No high-priced free agent has belly-flopped. No outfielder has unexpectedly been rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy.
The Braves won 96 games last season. They captured a flag (the National League East) for the first time since 2005. They accomplished this despite their two highest-paid players, B.J. Upton and Dan Uggla, hitting south of .200, veteran starting pitcher Tim Hudson being lost for the season in July and right fielder Jason Heyward losing chunks of his season to improbable injuries (a broken jaw after getting hit by a pitch and a problematic appendix).
“We won 96 games,” Gonzalez said. “If everybody hit like they were supposed to hit last year, we might have won 160.”
I believe that would be a record.
Hyperbole aside, the backdrop of 2013 seemingly would give reason for the Braves to be optimistic. All that went wrong, and still they tied for the third-best record in the majors?
The problem with projecting similar results in 2014 — and, it follows, winning a playoff round for the first time since 2001 — is it assumes every unexpectedly hot player (examples: Chris Johnson, Evan Gattis) will replicate his 2013 season. It assumes Upton and Uggla will improve. It assumes, to some degree, that they’ll be fine even if Washington isn’t four games under .500 (52-56) at the end of July — which they won’t be.
This Braves season is about assumptions. The Braves’ hope they will be better. They really didn’t do anything or operate proactively to get better.
They didn't sign or trade for a significant player. Instead, they let three players depart in free agency: Hudson, a solid veteran, to San Francisco; Brian McCann, the starting catcher, to the New York Yankees; Eric O'Flaherty, a reliever who had a 1.99 ERA in five years in Atlanta, to Oakland.
“You have to play the season. You can’t play it on paper,” Gonzalez said.
The Braves are proof of that. Too many Fantasy Leaguers projected them as a World Series team after the acquisitions of B.J. and Justin Upton. Instead, they were bounced by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the divisional playoffs, their eighth consecutive playoff series loss, dating to the 2001 National League Championship Series.
A Reno, Nev., sportsbook this week became the first to unveil 2014 over/under win totals for major league teams. The Braves are listed at 86.5. That would be a near 10-win drop from 2013.
Granted, odds are established merely to seek an even amount of money wagered on both sides. But odds reflect perceptions.
Gonzalez, of course, is confident. “Whatever team you break camp with is the team you’ve got to win with,” he said. “Now, if you ask 30 managers, they’ll all say, ‘I wish I had four more of these guys.’ But nobody has that. You evaluate your team and say, ‘OK, we’re pretty good.’ Assuming I don’t screw it up.”
After last season’s playoff exit, Gonzalez and general manager Frank Wren expressed a desire to acquire a No. 1 starting pitcher. That never happened. Uggla also is back in camp after Wren’s inability to trade him.
Washington, which isn’t likely to replicate last year’s poor start — the Nationals were 21-11 to finish the season — added starting pitcher Doug Fister in the winter.
“The division got better, as it should,” pitcher Kris Medlen said. “But we’re a pretty solid team. Some people blamed the Nationals playing bad (for the Braves winning the East), but from what I saw we played them pretty well. Were we making them look bad, or were they just that bad? No, they had great players. We just outplayed them.”
Medlen, the potential opening-day starter, believes the Braves’ liabilities are overstated.
“Fans panic,” he said, “Just because one team in a division makes a move doesn’t mean you have to. We like the pieces that we have. Frank’s working with a limited budget. Nobody’s thinking, ‘Oh, let’s go trade all of our prospects for David Price.’ Our organization doesn’t operate that way.”
The Braves chose to do nothing. They’ll know if that was the right call when they wake up in October.
