Atlanta Braves 2018: Kids these days, I swear

If they actually win the division there is no way I see them making it out of the first playoff round with that Russian Roulette bullpen.

We are extending an invitation to anyone who has evacuated to ATL due to Hurricane Florence to be our guests for the next 3 games at @SunTrustPark!

Complimentary tickets, discounted food options, free access to Hope and Will's Sandlot and more! Details: https://t.co/t0cyt2eR3V pic.twitter.com/4jxOECmLUn

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) September 13, 2018

Don't be surprised if Chad Sobotka gets tossed for using a foreign substance on the ball someday. He keeps his left forearm loaded up with something and isn't discreet about going to it between pitches.

Adrian:
What kind of market will there be for Markakis this offseason? Think the Braves will risk a Qualifying offer?

Dan Szymborski:
I’m not sure there will be a big one. He’s actually been fairly lousy in the second-half and nobody *really* believed he was an MVP candidate.

knew nothin about these guys

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-two-rookies-who-drive-the-braves-bullpen/

I've said before that I don't really get the money end of things. Am I reading this right? $45M for 9 years of Ozzie Albies? That seems like just about the greatest deal ever for Atlanta.

http://www.mlb.com/news/braves-ozzie-albies-extension

LOOGYs get more than 5/year

Atlanta's offense:

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/is-this-braves-lineup-the-best-ever?
r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

they're fun to watch this year

Apparently that link only gets you half the piece; here's the whole thing (sorry, Joe--but if you include a share link, you should include the whole piece).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HhJ8GyenzGGUGpNoDzXA6Vu1gyjlLDxcM-mCc_pzrgc/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for that article.

Despite the chop not being phased out quickly enough, it's clear to all I'm still a drooling fanboy for this team. The restaurant where I tend bar recently made some dumb changes to its cable package, eliminating the RSNs that show Braves games, which I'm sad about. I watch pretty much every game that doesn't happen during a bar shift.

As a 25-plus year denizen of Atlanta and a Braves fan, I have very mixed feelings about the chop. On the one hand, it's clearly an embarrassing anachronism. On the other, it still feels like a collective experience. The team has started dousing the lights around the 7th inning so that everyone can do the chop with their phone lights on. It feels like a rock concert. I'm sure we could figure out something to replace it with, but there seems to be little or no enthusiasm for doing so.

Maybe they could play this over the sound system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2rVbbz4oXc

The conventional wisdom about the chop seems to be that it was borrowed from Florida State and didn't arrive in Atlanta until Deion Sanders was traded to the Braves in 1991. I wonder if that's true? I don't remember seeing the chop earlier, but 1991 was about the time I started watching the Braves.

No idea, I was living in Denver then. We got Braves games on TBS, but the team wasn't worth watching.

xp I believe that’s the story.

I went to Fulton County stadium a couple of times in the 80s and they didn’t do the chop… but they did have a metal teepee in the center-field bleachers from which “Chief Knock-a-homa” would emerge from time to time and beat a tomtom drum.

Kevin Pillar is on his seventh team, so he's the kind of player I lose track of; had no idea he was playing for Atlanta right now. And not all that badly for a role player; 7 HR, slugging over .400, and presumably playing good defense.

from 1992, rescued for posterity by a former ILXor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8V5Eji2MyI

Too bad Strider (one more start max) won't have a shot at 300 K.

I'm a big Strider fan, but the lack of overall pitching in the league this year makes him one of the worst Cy Young front runner candidates in recent memory.

I don't follow him enough to know why his ERA is almost a run higher than his FIP...bad luck? His hits, walks, and strikeouts are all good to excellent, and his HR aren't bad.

I'll be happy if he breaks Smoltz's K record.

he's the most dominant guy in MLB when he's on, he's given up zero or one earned runs a dozen times. but he's given up 5+ earned runs on five occasions, and exactly 4 earned runs another five times.

I guess that would create an ERA/FIP discrepancy, the tendency to bunch runs together rather than have them more evenly distributed. Chris Bassitt has the same issue (though he's not dominant in the same way): 10 starts where he's given up 0 or 1 run, 9 starts giving up between 4-9. (He's got the same discrepancy, although his works in reverse, weirdly enough, with his ERA much better than his FIP.)

I briefly wondered if inherited runners might be to blame only because I saw a couple of inherited runners score in this game & Strider buried his face in his arms at the dugout. But it looks as though I either misremembered the scoring or it was changed due to being ascribed to fielding errors which left both of these RBIs attributable to the position players.

https://www.mlb.com/gameday/717242/play/55

But it doesn’t look from the stats that the Braves really has that much more of a problem with giving up inherited runners?

So then I was like, oh maybe Fangraphs knows and so:


NB this is a couple of weeks old

But he’s been undone to some degree by his 1.11 homers per nine, which is in a virtual tie for 15th among the 26 qualified NL starters, and his 3.83 ERA is 14th.

A look at Statcast’s expected home runs leaderboard shows that he’s allowed 2.8 more than projected based on exit velocities, launch angles, projected distances, and wall heights; among pitchers who have allowed at least 10 homers, that places him in the 91st percentile. Only five of his 25 homers were no-doubters (gone in all 30 parks) and five are doubters (gone in 1–7 parks). That’s some bad luck.

Still kinda hoping austin riley will get to 40 HR, a little shout-out to the first and only non-Rockies team w/three 40 homer guys ('73 braves: Hank, Davey Johnson, Darrell Evans)

(xpost) His HR rate is up compared to last year, but I didn't seem drastically so to me. So it does sound like luck is part of it.

I remember the '73 Braves trio well--Johnson, Evans, and that other guy.

"it didn't seem..."

This team is so good that I'd forgotten that Kyle Wright, who won 21 games last year, has been basically worthless this year and they haven't missed a beat.

Welp...the rotation's stepping on rakes at the worst possible time, down to approximately two worthy starters.

that was practically the rotation for the year though, no? i was actually thinking back to how this might be the most successful 100+ win team with basically 3 SPs all year and one was garbage the second half of the season! an absolute true testament to how dominant the offense was all year.

Don't really get the Jeff Francoeur reference (he likes to clown around?), but this is great:

Brandon Gaudin for Broadcaster of the Year. 🤣

"So the Braves go from Johnson to Hand and the batter will be Mastrobuoni...and it's probably a good thing Jeff Francoeur is in the other booth." ✊🍆 pic.twitter.com/jVLjb6Nx3w

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 27, 2023

pretty pretty impressive

The Atlanta Braves became the first team to slug .500 (.501) for a season. They tied the 2019 Twins for the single-season HR record (307). And they tied the '27 Yankees for top wRC+ (125) of all time.
'27 Yankees 🤝 '23 Braveshttps://t.co/lPxNlNTg0R

— Travis Sawchik (@Travis_Sawchik) October 2, 2023

I was looking at their regular nine-man lineup on Baseball Reference the other day and was awestruck. One guy with 17 HR, another with 18; two guys with 20-30, two with 30-40, two with 40-50, and Olson with 54. Every single one of them between 20-35 doubles. Not much on the bench, but unless someone gets hurt, a moot point.

Even better, think of the catchers with a combined 32 instead of Murphy's 21.

atlanta absolutely pillaged the a's for murphy and olson

ozzie signing an absurdly undervalued contract surely helped, but they are smart like tampa + money

This is great hate-read content