If Socrates could have thrown a sinker, this is what it would have been like:
To set the scene, it is a little after 8 in the morning, early in the Braves’ spring-training cycle when only pitchers and catchers are required to be in Florida. And before that time of day when any of them are obliged to sweat.
There is not a soul in the home dugout except Tim Hudson, the former Brave who is a 222-game winner, and Mike Soroka, just 20 and one of the flock of top pitching prospects the Braves have accumulated.
They are talking, Hudson the font of knowledge on the various grips that make a baseball squirm and Soroka the sponge.
“You play golf? You know how you hit the side of the golf ball it goes sideways? Same thing,” Hudson said as he mimes one way he spun the ball.
“Middle finger here,” he emphasizes, resting it just so against a seam.
This tutorial lasts nearly an hour, and it is nothing but shop talk, everything to do with the delivery of the unhittable baseball. Different grips. Grip pressures. Where to stand on the rubber. Tips on going backdoor with the slider even when it’s uncomfortable. The small details build to a large mound, which is kind of the whole idea of spring training.
Soroka is intent for every second of the lesson, proving that if he doesn’t make it, it won’t be for lack of curiosity or a keen respect for his elders.
Just one of a thousand little camp moments that by themselves are almost trivial in the grand scheme of building the 2018 Braves. Many pass unseen or unnoticed by fans who wait on the other side of March for the finished product. But put enough of them together and a pointillist portrait of spring training begins to take shape, revealing a little bit of the direction and personality of a team and a season. That’s even before the first pitch of the first exhibition game is delivered.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
No one sees the manager when he reports to work, and that’s the way Brian Snitker likes it. Before all the details of another day in Florida begin to chop away at him, Snitker tries to get in under the cover of darkness, around 5 a.m.
“That’s my time to get out and walk. I usually walk for an hour. Walk the complex. It’s a little scary sometimes,” he said.
Scary? What, has Donald Duck gone rogue?
Actually, there are tales of non-cartoon wildlife along the undeveloped fringes of Disney’s carefully sculpted world.
“I’ve been told there’s a (Florida) panther back there. Coyotes, too. There’s a bald eagle back there by the lake. If you get off the beaten path back there is some wild land,” Snitker said.
As you might expect of someone who has survived 41 years with the same organization, Snitker stays on the path.
Memo to editor: We probably won’t be needing that headline, “Braves Manager Mauled by Cougar.”
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
It is too early to tell if the oft-damaged Scott Kazmir – acquired as part of the trade that sent Matt Kemp back home to the Dodgers – can contribute to the Braves pitching staff. There is a month left to make a first impression.
But, with a single act on the first day of workouts for pitchers and catchers, Kazmir earned the early nomination for fan favorite.
Having worked with throwing coach Tom House in the offseason, Kazmir brought some of his drills with him to Florida. As he was strolling from the dugout on Day 1 with a football tucked under his arm – cross-sport throwing is a House thing – a fan yelled his way.
“Hey, Scott, you want to play catch?”
As a matter of fact, Kazmir did. He pulled 23-year-old Richard Pillsbury, an Atlantan who has been long-time fixture at Braves spring training, out of the stands and had an impromptu catch.
The session went 10 minutes, and Kazmir treated each of Pillsbury’s tosses like a Tom Brady perfect spiral.
The memory of a lifetime: How about the day you went to Braves spring training and threw the football around with a 12-year major league vet?
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Early camp plays out beyond boundaries of Champion Stadium, the main stage when the spring-training games begin. Out back is an array of other fields and batting cages – baseball farmland as far as the eye can see – where the real work is done.
It might be coach Ron Washington – who should just pitch a tent and set up camp, he’s on the field so early and so long – rolling underhand ground balls to a kneeling Ozzie Albies from point-blank range. This is the second-baseman’s regular morning feeding.
It might be a minor league coach brought up to work with the glut of players, putting the pitchers through the routine of covering first on a ball hit to their left until it becomes a reflex: “Face fair territory! Run in a straight line (to the first-base bag)!” He wants them to hear that in their sleep.
Or another coach treating major leaguers like Little Leaguers, drilling them on the three basics of bunting: “Balance. Bat angle. Direction.”
Then there are the non-baseball lessons that creep in during the down time between drills. The Braves’ batting cage, for instance, became a language laboratory for their young Venezuelan phenom Ronald Acuna.
As players waited their turn to hit, minor league catcher Kade Scivicque began instructing Acuna on some English, literally from the ground up. They began with body parts, a good base given those are the athlete’s tools of the trade. “Achilles. Calf. Shin,” Scivicque began, pointing to his leg as Acuna watched.
Just a couple of new words a day. That’s how you learn English, Acuna’s Double-A manager last year, Luis Salazar, told his young charge. The Braves hope he accumulates a big vocabulary, from head to toe, over many years.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
The Braves this week brought back 39-year-old reliever Peter Moylan for a look, and he immediately made his presence felt.
Going through defensive situation drills on the back field, Moylan was on the mound. “Bases loaded, nobody out,” announced a coach.
Responded the comically gifted Moylan, “Better bring somebody else in.”
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Juxtaposed against the various ancient and timeless drills this Braves spring is a thoroughly modern approach to baseball numerology. It seems the team, behind the leadership of new general manager Alex Anthopoulos, has hired a legion of young analysts who have been crunching statistics in the team basement all winter.
This spring, for the first time, they Braves have met individually with each player, and through a short PowerPoint presentation, laid out in cold figures what he has done well and what needs to be tightened up.
“They show you the numbers, and you can choose to accept them or not,” starter Mike Foltynewicz said. “It’s all there, no arguing with the numbers.”
And what did the young pitcher learn from the analytics? “It’s all about strike one,” Foltynewicz said. He surely suspected the importance of getting ahead of the hitter, but now it has been neatly quantified for him.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Granted, autograph-seekers sometimes are obstacles players try to avoid on their way to the field and the batting cage. They line the walkway from the players’ parking lot to the field. They inhabit the stands of the main stadium and the walkways of the back fields.
Some will do anything to get a signature.
There was a story running through the Braves’ clubhouse this week, a cautionary tale, about the man in the wheelchair one year who was very successful at getting players to sign. How, after all, are you going to turn down his request?
Then, at workout’s end one day, a player happened to spy this same fellow loading the wheelchair into his car, walking around like he was limbering up for the start a marathon. It’s enough to make you doubt the basic goodness of mankind.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
There are bad days of spring training. Snitker can think of two, at least, in his now 42nd Braves spring. The day in 1995 in West Palm Beach when replacement pitcher Dave Shotkoski was shot and killed during a robbery attempt. And the afternoon in 2011 when Salazar lost an eye after being hit by a Brian McCann foul ball.
Otherwise, “I’ve never seen a bad baseball day,” Snitker said. “Even a bad day on the field are things you can work on and you can take something positive from.
“It’s such a great time of year, it’s hard to have a bad day here.”
One of the good and true autograph seekers, a grandmotherly presence in the stands all the first week of camp, Katharine Goodson from McMinnville, Tenn., put it another way.
“It helps me get through the winter knowing I have baseball, spring training and warm weather coming,” she said.
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