WASHINGTON – You know your team’s losing skid is bad when out-of-town writers start coming over to ask the manager how he and his team are dealing with it and what they can do to get out of it.
That’s what happened all week with the Braves and manager Fredi Gonzalez, who’s been asked those questions by national and Washington-area writers before and after games in this week’s series at Nationals Park. The Braves were 0-8 with the majors’ worst run differential (minus-27) before Thursday’s series finale against the Nationals.
Gonzalez responded to a few questions about the slump before Thursday afternoon’s game.
“I’m not going to say we’re going to win 100 games, but we’re better than this 0-8 start that we have,” he said. “We’ll get through it. I have no worries about that. I feel like my biggest job is for me and my coaching staff to stay upbeat and stay positive and do the right thing. Because they (players) are looking, they’re looking for your leadership, to your body language or whatever, bad comments in the paper, pointing fingers…. And to stay positive. That’s hard.
“We’re all competitors, you don’t want to go in every night and say, OK, we lost again. Because eventually I’m going to say something bad. That’s my biggest concern, making sure I stay positive, upbeat, supportive. Doing my job, which is putting guys in the right spot to be successful. Sometimes you’ve got to think outside the box like we did today a little bit with the off day for (Freddie) Freeman and the (Marlins) lefty going tomorrow, (Jace) Peterson in left field, that kind of stuff. But that’s really the most challenging part of this whole thing….
“But we’re better than O-8, believe me. You look at the best teams in the world, guys that win 100 games, they went 0-5 one week, or 1-7. You know, right now it’s us and the Minnesota Twins (also 0-8 before Thursday). We’re cheering for each other, I’m hoping they beat the White Sox and I hope Paul (Molitor, Twins manager) is hoping that we beat the Nationals just to get that zero out of the left column.”
