LOS ANGELES – While the Braves continued to pursue a trade for a left-handed reliever and possibly a bench player before Thursday's 4 p.m. non-waiver trade deadline, their All-Star first baseman and manager didn't seem too concerned about the possibility of making no major moves this week.
“I don’t keep up with it, personally,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said of trade rumors. “We’ve got enough to worry about, going out there and playing three hours every single night and trying to win ballgames. That’s what their job is. Our job is to be on the field and not worry about that, go out there and play hard every night.”
Pressed further on the subject, Freeman said, “I keep hearing lefty arm, that’s about it. That’s all I’ve heard. Whatever happens, happens. We’ll welcome that person if he comes. If not, we’ll keep going out there and doing what we’re doing and keep trying to win ballgames against these really good teams.”
The Braves were 9-11 in the past 20 games before Wednesday and had scored three runs or fewer in half of those games, an indication to many of the team’s need to bolster an inconsistent offense in addition to finding a left-hander to fill that obvious need in the bullpen.
However, the Braves are already about $10 million over budget for the year after signing starting pitcher Ervin Santana to a $14.1 million contract out of necessity during spring training. Besides, since their lineup is occupied at every position with players either young and promising or signed to long-term contracts that virtually assure they’re not going to be benched permanently, it appears the only place the Braves could realistically improve the offense is the bench.
“We’re who we are and we’re, what, 1 ½ games, one game behind the Nationals in our division?” said Gonzalez, whose Braves were a half-game behind NL East leader Washington before Wednesday. “So you feel like you’ve got a pretty good club. Yeah, you want to always improve, but you don’t want to take away from your own club, if you can (help it). A piece here, a piece there.
“The more I’ve gotten used to this, it’s not like after tomorrow you can not make a trade. People sometimes panic and say, we can’t make a trade. No, there’s other ways to make trades and improve your club, all the way to Aug. 31. I think we make a big deal out of it – and it is a big deal – but there’s other ways you can still improve your club after the trade deadline.”
Freeman said adding a lefty to the bullpen would help the Braves against the Phillies and other division teams with plenty of left-handed hitters. But he didn’t see a need to make other changes and said he liked the composition of the team’s starting rotation and position players and believed the Braves were good enough in those areas to advance deep in the postseason.
“Yeah, I definitely do,” he said. “We’ve got a great group of position players, they go out there and battle and fight every single day. Our bench is veteran, and that’s what we need — we have a lot of young guys (in the starting lineup) out there playing every single day. So I think we have a good mix of veteran and young guys right now.
“Obviously the bench guys aren’t getting as much playing time as they want because we’re out there every single day because we’re so young. But I think Fredi’s doing a good job getting them in here, sticking Schafe (Jordan Schafer) in, Doumy (Ryan Doumit) in (right field) these two days, getting some at-bats in with Jason (Heyward) out with a stiff back.
“You never want someone to get hurt, but this is kind of a blessing in disguise to give our bench guys some ABs so they can help us out through the stretch run here.”
