“It’s too early to panic,” outfielder Cameron Maybin said Wednesday, almost prompting a laugh. Panic? If anything, the Braves should be staging one of Chuck Tanner’s parades down Peachtree.
Panic? A team that one scout suggested to Sports Illustrated might lose 100 games has won six of nine. All things considered, the Braves have done well for themselves. The ballyhooed Washington Nationals would trade records in a Beltway minute.
The Washington Nationals would not, however, trade rosters.
The final four games of their opening homestand brought to light a colder reality than was glimpsed in that 5-0 start. The Braves lost three of the four, scoring a total of 10 runs.They managed 25 hits over 35 innings.
For all the happy talk about this team putting the ball in play and manufacturing runs, the four runs scored in Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s losses were functions of bases-empty homers. The Braves were 0-for-4 with runners in scoring position in Tuesday’s 8-2 loss; in losing 6-2 Wednesday, they were 0-for-2 with RISP, both chances coming in the first inning.
That was before Miami’s Dan Haren settled himself. He needed 28 pitches to negotiate the first inning; he needed only 29 to work the next three. Haren, who’s 34, fits the definition of a journeyman — he has worked for seven clubs, four in the past four seasons — and in the way he works he mirrors Aaron Harang (less 60 pounds). Haren didn’t throw hard. He just threw with precision.
The Braves put the ball in play against Haren — only five strikeouts in seven innings — but to little effect. Maybin’s homer in the sixth cut the deficit to 5-1; Kelly Johnson’s homer in the seventh made it 5-2. No Brave reached base thereafter. And here we saw the flaw in having a roster full of guys who hit for contact, as opposed to power.
For decades, the Braves were been dangerous in the late innings because their pitchers seldom let them fall far behind and because they had hitters who could change a game with one swing. Apart from Freddie Freeman, who scares an opponent now? Jonny Gomes last hit 20 homers in a season in 2009; Nick Markakis last did in 2008. Even Freeman — whose career best in homers is 23 — is more apt to hit a double than a home run.
The part about not striking out as much? That’s going well. The Braves entered Wednesday’s game with the second-fewest whiffs among National League teams. The part about stringing together a bunch of singles and succeeding through A-B-C baseball? That’s going to be tough. Through nine games, the Braves have hit .236 as a team with an on-base percentage of .299; last year’s awful crew hit .241 with an OBP of .305. (Different sample sizes, I know.)
The point being: This remains a team of limited talent. For all the talk of grit and gravitas, the Braves’ position players are, as a group, substandard. The only thing that can lift this team above its station is the same thing that lifted last year’s team until September, when everything collapsed. That’s pitching, and this year’s pitching looks rather different.
The top three starters — Julio Teheran, Alex Wood and Shelby Miller — are good. (Teheran is better than good.) The Braves are 5-1 in games started by those three. They’re 1-2 in games started by Eric Stults and Trevor Cahill. Last year the Braves had five excellent starters in Teheran, Harang, Wood, Mike Minor and Ervin Santana. Two of those five are gone, and Minor’s career in is flux.
If the Braves cannot find a functioning No. 4 starter, let alone a No. 5, they won’t above .500 long. Stults yielded three runs in five innings against the Mets on Friday and was worse Wednesday — four runs in five innings, the final two coming on the seventh homer of Adieny Hechavarria’s career.
“We’re still playing good baseball,” Stults said. “Today the pitching wasn’t good enough.”
“The pitching’s been great,” Kelly Johnson said. “We’ve got to score some runs.”
Starting pitching is the most important commodity in baseball, but relievers matter. Given that the matchless Craig Kimbrel was traded on the eve of Opening Day, the Braves’ bullpen — second among NL teams in ERA as of noon Wednesday — has been good beyond belief. Jason Grilli and Jim Johnson, who’ve done it before, appear capable of tending to the ninth and eighth innings. But will the likes of Cody Martin and Brandon Cunniff — each of whom yielded his first earned run Wednesday — be able to handle the seventh?
From a team of which so little was expected, the Braves’ 5-0 start was stirring stuff, and there’s nothing at all wrong with 6-3. But with such meager resources, almost everything has to go right for this team to have a chance. For the first five games, almost everything did. We’re starting to see what happens when it doesn’t.
