They tried just running him out there. They tried benching him. They tried a different hitting coach. They tried contact lenses. They tried Lasik surgery. They even tried — actually, this was an accident — bringing in B.J. Upton to join the misery-loves-company support group. Nothing worked. For Dan Uggla as an Brave, nothing ever worked.
For reasons that may forever be unclear, a good major-league player stopped being a major-league player. He didn’t get hurt. He didn’t contract vertigo. (That’s a reference to Nick Esasky, long since supplanted as the most unfortunate big-ticket signing in Braves annals.) Dan Uggla simply ceased being Dan Uggla.
From the moment he arrived, he wasn’t nearly the player he was as a Marlin. He hadn’t changed leagues, hadn’t even changed divisions. He had the same manager he had in Miami. A move that should have succeeded failed so completely that the Braves agreed Friday to pay Uggla $19 million to go away.
They could have cut him last season, when he was left off the postseason roster, or in May, when he lost his starting job once and for all. They hung on because they kept hoping somebody would give them pennies on the million to take him off their hands. Nobody was that stupid. The Braves have known for some time they would have to eat the rest of that massive contract. The only issue was when they finally would take that big gulp.
It’s unclear whether Uggla sought to force the issue by arriving an hour before Saturday’s game in Chicago, but the cause-and-effect seems, ahem, cut-and-dried. Tardy Dan was suspended for Sunday’s game and released 4 1/2 hours before play resumed after the All-Star break. His last act as a Brave was to show up late.
In the end, this was less about Uggla than about the 24 other Braves and their manager. Because Fredi Gonzalez could count on Uggla to do nothing good, the Braves were operating at a competitive disadvantage on a daily basis. This was patently unfair to the 24 real players — happily, B.J. Upton again meets that description — who are trying to fight off Washington and maybe win a World Series.
The Braves don’t play college football, where an overrated signee can be hidden among 85 scholarships. Until rosters expand in September, they have only 25 spots. Because of Uggla, they essentially made do with 24. That shouldn’t have gone on as long as it did, but now he’s gone and the Braves get to be a full 25 again.
For 3 2/3 seasons we’ve discussed little except Uggla — OK, sometimes we’ve mentioned B.J. Upton — but as he takes his leave we need to reiterate: This should have succeeded. Frank Wren will forever be faulted for a wrong-headed trade/signing, but there’s a difference between a poor decision and a poor result. What the Braves’ general manager saw in Uggla in December 2010 was what everyone in baseball saw — a middle infielder who had managed at least 27 homers and 88 RBIs in each of his five big-league seasons.
True, Uggla wasn’t much of a fielder — his three errors in the 2008 All-Star Game cast a shadow — and he averaged 152 strikeouts over five Fish seasons. But he was a right-handed hitter who figured to balance lefties Brian McCann, Jason Heyward and Freddie Freeman, and the only way Wren would have traded the useful Omar Infante and Mike Dunn was if the Braves intended to re-up Uggla, who could have become a free agent after the 2011 season. (They learned their lessons with J.D. Drew and Mark Teixeira.)
Wren invested $62 million in Uggla over five seasons, which in the cold light of hindsight sounds scandalous, but consider: That winter Jayson Werth, a righty who had hit more than 24 homers and driven in more than 67 runs only once and who at 31 was a year older than Uggla, signed with Washington for $126 million over seven seasons. I had reservations about the length of Uggla’s extension — and I’m never crazy about high-strikeout guys who are iffy afield — but I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t be a productive player a while longer. Back then, nobody did.
Uggla didn’t just fail to deliver what the Braves had hoped. Over time, he failed to deliver anything at all. Baseball men believe that if you’ve always hit, you’ll continue to hit. Uggla hit until he became a Brave, whereupon he stopped. It made — and makes — no sense, but it became grim reality. The Braves paid for a hitter who could anchor their lineup. The guy they released wasn’t even worthy of the 25th spot on a 25-man roster.
