Last year, they excelled at doing things the hard way. Not with talent, but with duct tape. Not with stability, but with an ever-mutating lineup. Not with logic, but with desire, heart and mojo.
The Braves returned to Turner Field for the first time this season Friday night against Philadelphia, a team that for four years has owned the National League East, a division the Braves once treated as their own BarcaLounger. This team is more talented and certainly healthier than the one that was dropping engine parts down the stretch a year ago. But that whole concept of doing things the hard way may be a difficult identity to let go of.
With their offense struggling through most of a 3-4 start, the Braves chose an unusual path to give their fans an early-season sigh of relief. They spotted Cliff Lee, this winter’s major acquisition, a 3-0 lead, then chased the former Cy Young winner with six runs and 10 hits by the fourth inning and won a 6-3 victory before a sellout crowd.
The Braves are 4-4. Starter Tim Hudson is 2-0. Closer Craig Kimbrel has three saves. And manager Bobby Cox is 1-0 when he sits in the owner’s box.
Yes, that was the strangest sight of all Friday night. Cox, who was prompted to make a curtain call and received a standing ovation from fans in October when the Braves lost their third one-run game to San Francisco in the divisional playoffs, was back at the stadium for the season opener. He threw out the first pitch to Fredi Gonzalez — one of those passing-of-the-torch things.
The pitch appeared to be a ball, low and inside. Cox opted not to argue. It would’ve been bad form for even him to get tossed on a ceremonial pitch.
Coming off their first playoff season in five years, the Braves decided pomp and circumstance were in order for the home opener. They unveiled a pennant that commemorated the wild-card berth (the crowd didn’t seem too caught up in the moment). They had all of the players enter the field through a door in center field.
Afterward, Cox took his seat in the owner’s box with, among others, President Jimmy Carter. It was a good seat, but not the closest he has ever sat for a game.
Braves players ran onto the field amid fireworks, balloons and music. Then the Phillies quieted the house quickly.
Coming off three consecutive losses in Milwaukee might not hold a lot of significance in April, but it didn’t create much in the way of positive foreshadowing for the Phillies series.
The biggest concern was the offense. The Braves scored 24 runs in their first seven games, which isn’t awful until you realize 11 of those came in one day at Washington. Simple math: They scored only 13 in the other six games, and entered the night with a team batting average of .226.
Then came the start to this one: The Phillies had a 3-0 lead after two innings against Hudson. Handing early 3-0 leads to Lee generally isn’t the formula for success. But Hudson settled down after that, and Lee turned out not to be a problem. The Braves chased him with three runs in the second and three in the fourth.
They dented the former Cy Young winner with 10 hits in 3 1/3 innings, including a bases-clearing double by Chipper Jones in the fourth.
Jones later was given a standing ovation after leading off the sixth inning with a single, the 2,500th hit of his career. Somewhere in the owner’s box, there probably was a 69-year-old former manager screaming, “Way to go, kid!”
Much like Cox’s last team, Gonzalez’s first one with the Braves didn’t do things by the book Friday night. But that’s not a bad thing.
