This will sound weird, but here goes: The Braves could use a losing streak.
Not because losing is fun — it isn’t — but because losing would bring clarity to a season that has confused everyone, its architect included. “Go back to the beginning of the year,” president of baseball operations John Hart said Monday, “and I don’t think any of us envisioned this would be a buying year. We clearly made an organizational decision to reset and restart where we are.”
Even on the eve of Opening Day, the Braves in their first offseason under Hart were selling. (Call the roll of famous departures: Heyward, J. Upton, Gattis, finally Kimbrel and M. Upton.) Then the actual games began, and Hart’s team has outperformed expectations by just enough to complicate what seemed a straightforward rebuilding plan.
The Braves awoke Monday having won none of their past six series, which tells us they’re no colossus. But they weren’t swept in any of the six, and they split two. Their record since Memorial Day was 8-12, which was enough to drop them three games below .500 but not to rule them out of anything. They trailed the division-leading Mets by 3 1/2 games, the second-place Nationals by three.
Baseball’s trade deadline is 6 1/2 weeks away. Say the Braves are still 3 1/2 games out of first place as July 31 nears: Will the offseason sellers start buying?
“If we’re where we are four weeks from now, we’ll evaluate,” Hart said. “I kind of feel like the kid in the Dutch painting, putting fingers in the dike. Right now we’re holding.”
The artistic reference was to the Braves’ bullpen, which has the second-worst ERA in baseball and has blown an MLB-worst 13 saves. If four of those saves had been converted, this unassuming team would have been leading the National League East.
“You’ve seen us add bullpen pieces,” Hart said, referring to David Aardsma and Dana Eveland, signed to minor-league deals and already promoted to the major-league roster. “We’re the land of opportunity for bullpen help right now.”
Aardsma and Eveland, however, cost nothing but money (and not much of that). If the Braves hang relatively close for another month, Hart will be faced with a choice: Does he pay the going rate — meaning prospects — on a proven arm to work the seventh inning for a team that could hit the wall in August?
“If it were mid-July, I’d be aggressively looking,” he said, citing the roster-builder’s obligation to give his players and manager a fighting chance. “I’m old-school that way. If we’re smelling it … “
Here Hart stopped short of making a blanket statement about a blank check. “I can’t go out and re-invent the wheel. If there is a clear piece, you make every effort you can. (But) I’m not going to abandon ship (meaning the overall course of the franchise). We’re not going to chase down something where we just gut our farm system and do something crazy.”
The under-new-management Braves chose to err on the side of youth, specifically young starting pitching, while not quite punting away the here and now. The here and now has been shockingly OK: Without Heyward and Gattis and the Uptons, the Braves rank 10th in baseball in runs, up from the 29th of last season. “I’m very proud of this club,” Hart said. “I’m disappointed we’ve let so many games slip.”
He blames himself for much of that. (“I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights.”) The Kimbrel trade, which bubbled up as the Braves broke camp at Disney, left little chance to reconfigure the bullpen. Jason Grilli was bumped from being an eighth-inning man and has done a passable job as closer, but other innings suffered. All of which has left the Braves close enough to gnash corporate teeth as to where they’d be with even a mid-tier bullpen.
On Monday, we saw a clear acknowledgement of the standings. The Braves demoted Christian Bethancourt, long considered their catcher of the future, to Gwinnett. Had they been 10 1/2 games back, they’d surely have let him play through his travails. (He was hitting .208 with five passed balls.) Being 3 1/2 out, they can’t in good conscience continue to give games away.
But that was one move, made in mid-June. What might July hold? Said Hart: “If this club fights through it and other clubs continue to stumble, we’ll jump into that (buying) arena.”
But don’t expect him to sacrifice a goodly chunk of the future so this team might win 83 games, as opposed to 79. The way it’s looking, the Braves would have to take the division to make the playoffs — they’re fifth in line for the second wild card — and Baseball Prospectus gives them only a 2.1 percent chance of doing that.
“It’s a long way until the end of July,” Hart said, and sweet clarity could well have descended by then.
