SAN FRANCISCO – For anyone who questioned how much of a factor Brian McCann's injured shoulder was in his career-worst season in 2012, his performance since coming back from the disabled list has probably answered that.
McCann went 4-for-8 with two home runs and five RBIs in the first two games of the series against the Giants on Thursday and Friday, the veteran catcher’s third and fourth games since coming off the DL, after nearly seven months recovering from October surgery for a torn labrum.
“You never know, you can’t feel what kind of pain a guy’s having, how much it’s affecting him,” Braves bench coach Carlos Tosca said. “This guy looks like the guy who won Silver Slugger awards. Whereas (last season) you could see it, you could tell — you could see him grimace sometimes at the end of a swing.
“To his credit, he’s worked real hard to get himself back, and got himself in good shape. It’s going to be big for us.”
Braves hitting coach Greg Walker had a better idea than most how much he was hurting last season, when McCann, 29, had career-worsts in batting average (.230), on-base percentage (.300) and slugging percentage (.399). He snapped a franchise-record streak of six consecutive All-Star berths in his first six full seasons.
“It was hard to watch him last year knowing how hard he was working and how hard he was trying, and it just wasn’t there,” Walker said of McCann, who had never hit below .269 or slugged below .452 in a full season. “But he kept playing and played through it — we had a good team, and it was Chipper (Jones)’s last year, and all those things. But when you’d go to the cage with him, and watch his batting practice….
“I played my whole career with a bad shoulder. I’ve had, like, eight arm operations. There’s certain days you can’t compete. You just go out there and fight and fight, but you just don’t have the weapons that it takes to compete at this level. And he fought through it; what did he hit, 20 home runs? But he wasn’t Brian McCann. Ever.”
McCann’s 20 homers made it six times he reached that standard in seven full seasons in the majors, and the former five-time Silver Slugger award winner did it in the fewest games (121) and plate appearances (487) of his career.
He needed multiple cortisone injections and several rest periods to get through the season, and by the end the medication didn’t provide more than a few days’ relief.
“We talked about it a lot,” Walker said. “I knew what he was going through. But he just kept going out there, like a champ…. You see the things he’s doing now and you see the things he couldn’t do last year. It’s good to see him healthy. When he’s healthy, he hits. He’s a great hitter.
“Now that he’s healthy, we’re a better team. It balances our lineup out. You’ve got another high-average, contact hitter that we need in the middle of our lineup.”
While McCann was on the DL for the first five weeks of the season, rookie Evan Gattis and veteran backup Gerald Laird came though and kept Braves catchers among the league’s most productive.
Gattis has hit .272 with six homers and 16 RBIs in 81 at-bats as a catcher, and Laird hit .300 in 30 at-bats before Saturday, when he made his 10th start behind the plate with McCann getting a day off after consecutive night games (Gattis played left field Saturday).
“Gattis and Gerald did fantastic while he was out,” Walker said. “It just makes us a deeper team. A lot of teams can’t find one catcher, and we have three.”
