Braves quotes from Chris Johnson, Alex Wood, Dan Uggla and manager Fredi Gonzalez after Sunday’s loss to the Giants and six-game losing streak.
**FREDI GONZALEZ
On tough luck day for Wood
“He battled every inning. I don’t think he had a clean inning. He had over 100 pitches in five innings and he still kept us in the ballgame. He did his part other than just going five innings. But he kept us in the ballgame. We just got one run again.”
On the offensive woes
“I don’t want to use the word frustrating, but I don’t know what’s another word I can use. We’re too talented a team offensively to not be able to put a crooked number up. The one part of me says every team goes through this kind of stuff. And they do. You look at all the great teams, someplace in the middle of a season where you think that nobody has ever picked up a bat or a ball or forgot how to manage. The glass that is half full is we’re too talented of a club. Somebody is going to have to pay for it sooner or later. Somebody is going to come in here and we’re going to score 10 runs a game for a week or two, so that’s my mindset right now. We’ve got too good of a club, too talented of a club offensively to keep throwing up one run or two runs every night.”
Tempted to shake things up with lineup?
“Well we’ll see what’s going on tomorrow. I don’t know about shaking it up too much. It’s the (same) club, basically, that won the division last year, won 96 games. Sometimes you’ve got to take a little step back before you go forward and we’ve played now almost, all the starters have gotten over 100-something at-bats, so you know what, it’s maybe come in and see something a little different but nothing major.”
On some golden opportunities such as runner at third, one out
“Yeah, with the right guys at the plate. Sometimes it goes like that. That’s why you scratch your head because you’ve seen guys really be productive 1 through the whole offensive lineup, and then you go through spurts like this. It’s a good thing and the thing that we always talk about is our pitching is there, it’s keeping us in ballgames, and sooner or later our offense will start cranking up.”
On the J. Upton at-bat…if you get to breaking point
“I think I answered that question about the lineup a second ago, you go back, sit back and try figure out what you’re going to do tomorrow. We’ll see what transpires, tomorrow’s lineup, but you can’t — you know what I hate and I won’t and I never will fingerpoint to blame one guy because these guys, one thing that you can control as a manager is effort and work ethic and the way they prepared and they do that. Other than that, it’s pretty much that’s all you can do. And they’re doing all that. So for me to sit there and point (fingers), we lost the game because of this guy or that guy, I’d never do that because I’d be the first one to point the finger on myself.”
On Uggla hitting one to the wall, Freeman hitting into the shift, opposite way – examples of how things going for you?
“That’s the way it goes sometimes. You scratch your head. But again, it’s been over 30 games and we’ve gone through a little stretch, so maybe tomorrow we’ll come up with a little something different, but again nothing major because this is a club that won the division. But sometimes we need a little break here and there.”
**ALEX WOOD
On whether can take any positives or feel good about your performance
“It’s hard to feel good about anything about yourself, at this moment in time it’s about how we are as a unit and starting to right the ship. We have the Cardinals in here tomorrow and hopefully we’ll kind of get things going tomorrow.”
Fredi said he wouldn’t use frustration, would that word fit what this has been like for you?
“I mean, yeah, it’s a lot of things. We’re doing some things so well, and other things we’re not doing so well. One game you do the opposite, you do the other thing well. It’s just kind of not putting it all together. Hopefully we’ll get it going here the rest of this long homestand and kind of right the ship.”
From the dugout, watching your guys get runners on and not getting them over and in
“For me during the game, when you’re pitching, I’m just kind of focusing on my own job. I mean, everybody plays their role. It’s just not all clicking right now. We’ve got a great squad, we’ve got a good lineup, a good pitching staff, and hopefully here very soon it’ll all start clicking.”
On his performance
“It’s never your goal just to get through five; everybody wants to get deep in the game. But they’ve got a good lineup and battled me all day and got my pitch count up there. Thankfully I was able to get through five.”
On bunting, getting one down successfully
“Our staff as a whole has been out there every day doing early work, bunting off the machine every day that we’re at home.”
On whether he changes approach in any way recently, knowing there’s not much margin for error
“It doesn’t matter. I think any of the guys will tell you that anytime you go out, you’ve got one approach and that’s to put up zeroes every single inning, regardless of what else is going on. It’s not like you go into a start thinking if I just give a quality start – six innings, three runs – I’m going to get a win, I’m going to be fine with that. I don’t think anybody at this level, and I know for a fact on this team, has that thought process. Everybody wants to go out there and do what we’ve done for the entire first month, and put up zeroes every time we step foot on the mound.”
**CHRIS JOHNSON
Fredi Gonzalez said he didn’t want to use the word frustration but…
“I would. I mean, it’s nothing wrong with that. A little frustration. But we’ve got to keep grinding it out, we’ve got to keep working and try to figure out what’s going on. It’s the first time since I’ve been over here that we’ve kind of experienced something like this, so I think it’ll tell a lot about our ballclub, to see how we respond and how we bounce back form something like this.”
On seeing Uggla fly out to wall, kind of way things going for you guys?
“Yeah, he missed a home run by a couple of feet. But we don’t make excuses around here. We’ve got to do better with guys in scoring position. We’ve just got to keep grinding and get out of this.”
Braves are struggling and Giants came in hot
“Yeah, that’s not a good combination when we’re not playing good baseball and they’re playing their best. Then you get swept. It stinks that we got swept at home, too. But we’ve got some more games coming up at home, two more series here, so hopefully we can bounce back. We’ve got a good Cardinals club coming in, so we better snap out of this thing quick.”
On confidence level of team
“We’ve got a lot of confidence in ourselves, we know we’re going to bust out of this thing. I think that’s why we’re not getting TOO frustrated. This team works really hard. We take a lot of hacks (in batting practice), we take a lot of pride in our offense and in getting better every day. So I don’t see, hopefully, this thing dragging on too long.”
Is there anything to the notion of guys pressing during slump like this
“Yeah, especially when you get two outs and a couple of guys on. When you should probably take your walk, you kind of go out of the zone and try to make something happen. It’s really hard to do, every time you get up in that situation you want to be the guy and help the team and help get us out of that funk. But that’s normal. We’ve just got to try to relax and not get too anixious when we’re in those spots.”
**DAN UGGLA
On frustration among Braves hitters
“Yeah, we’ve been struggling. We’ve got to turn the corner and just turn this thing around, like now. Just got to keep grinding, keep working and we’ll get it turned around.”
On not giving pitchers much run support
“Our pitching’s been great. For whatever reason our offense hasn’t done what it’s capable of doing. At the same time, we had a great April. You don’t look at how you’re winning, you just look at winning. Regardless if you’re winning 1-nothing games, or 9-1, winning’s the most important thing. But we haven’t really been winning too much lately so we’ve got to turn that around.”
On continued woes with runners in scoring position
“These games could easily have went our way. Not easily, but with a few timely hits in situations at certain times today and yesterday and the day before, it’s a different ballgame. But they made the pitches they needed to and whether it was a line-drive out or a strikeout, we didn’t get that run across.”
On idea that some players could be pressing
“We’ve all played this game a long time. It’s easy to say things when you’re watching on TV or from the stands and trying to figure out what’s going on. But really you can’t put a finger on it. You’ve just got to keep working as a player and keep believing in yourself and in your teammates, and grind it out together. And that’s how you get it turned around. You can’t just say, oh, let’s stop pressing, or, let’s stop having these stressful at-bats. Whatever the case may be. You put your nose in the dirt and keep grinding, and you pick each other up. It didn’t happen today. We’re going to come out with the same mentality tomorrow and pick each other up and stick our nose in the dirt and say, let’s go.”
