Atlanta Braves Thread (I HURT MYSELF TODAY TO SEE IF I STILL FEEL)

Status
Not open for further replies.
#9,676
#9,676
Evan Gattis hitting 11 triples in a season, to me, is still the most freak stat I've ever seen. Trout's career high is 9.


Gattis with a nice season last year. 32 HRs, .251/.319/.508
 
#9,677
#9,677
Scotty's Flat Top said:
Went from .330 to .243 and 42 dongs to 24. Seems like that will be his trajectory. Up and down. Isn't close to Trout level but then no one is
Click to expand...

I doubt that will be his floor going forward. Wonder if he was hurt. I think he bounces back for a big year.
 
#9,678
#9,678
Scotty's Flat Top said:
Evan Gattis hitting 11 triples in a season, to me, is still the most freak stat I've ever seen. Trout's career high is 9.


Gattis with a nice season last year. 32 HRs, .251/.319/.508
Click to expand...

Still got a hell of a haul for him if Ruiz is capable as a starter (which I think he is)
 
#9,680
#9,680
zjcvols said:
I doubt that will be his floor going forward. Wonder if he was hurt. I think he bounces back for a big year.
Click to expand...

Honesty last season was closer to his mean and the previous was the outlier. He needs to string together consecutive seasons like he had to be up there with Trout. He can do it and will at some point but I don't think it will be consistent like say an Albert Pujols. For one think he seems to get hurt too much amongst other things. Of course he barreled a lot of balls last year right at people. Those will work themselves out.
 
#9,681
#9,681
Scotty's Flat Top said:
Honesty last season was closer to his mean and the previous was the outlier. He needs to string together consecutive seasons like he had to be up there with Trout. He can do it and will at some point but I don't think it will be consistent like say an Albert Pujols. For one think he seems to get hurt too much amongst other things. Of course he barreled a lot of balls last year right at people. Those will work themselves out.
Click to expand...

A good sign to me was the K and BB % numbers didn't go all wacky. But it was a weird year.

Need him to make up for Murphy's regression.
 
#9,683
#9,683
zjcvols said:
I read a fantastic article that part of baseball's allure is that it is the one sport where you can do other things while having the game on.
Click to expand...

Not only can you, but it's better that way. My default mode during the lazy summer months is to turn a TV on and mute it, then carry a radio around the house, in and out to the deck, etc. Then when things get interesting run to the TV. When I was 16 I could happily just sit down and watch an ordinary regular season game all the way through -- on a 12 inch TV, no less -- but that was a simpler time. And even then I'd have a book in my lap.

05_never_again said:
They say there is too much dead time between plays, but the average NFL game has only 10-11 minutes of actual game action. Baseball probably has less, but I bet it is not dramatically so.
Click to expand...

Football's got such a short season that every game -- every drive, even! -- feels critical. Thus all that dead time just becomes tension. In a hypothetical world where the football season was 80 or 160 games long and each individual game was therefore practically meaningless, all the huddling up and standing around in football would feel like a giant boring waste of time. The pace of football is basically what baseball would feel like if every game was a playoff game.

zjcvols said:
I think baseball's popularity has not wained. It just has not grown like the other two sports. They routinely beat out the NBA for local ratings and while national ratings are not great compared to other sports they are still pretty solid.

I think it is a multitude of things why baseball cannot attract a younger following:

1) I do not believe that baseball embraced the social media aspect of our culture like they should have and that put them behind. That has incredibly helped the NBA.

2) Baseball is a thinking man's game. Part of the fun of watching the game is guessing where a pitcher is going and how a hitter will adjust. Just not suited for this generation.

3) Baseball doesnt have a lot of action which does not help in today's day.

4) Baseball does not have that cool factor and I personally (me and Brown disagree here) don't believe baseball has done a good job promoting young stars. I think they relied too much on the old guard and when they went away did not position itself for new stars. Basketball had this problem after Jordan.

5) Sabermetrics intimdate prospective fans. They see the statcast or WAR or DRS or BAPIP and hear about that and they do not want to be dumb so they just stay away from becoming ingrained with it.
Click to expand...

Baseball's a six-month long story dripped out at an extremely deliberate pace, and that's a hard sell in the 21st century. Baseball's a Russian novel, basically. Imagine if you started watching a new Netflix show and season one was thirty hours long and it really settled enthusiastically down into taking the first four or five episodes just to establish who the characters are.

When I was trying to get Mrs Verc into baseball after we moved here during the 90s (oh how I dreamed of season tickets), she could just not get over how during a normal three-game series the Braves might beat the Mets 4-1 on Friday, then the Mets would win 9-2 on Saturday, and then the Braves might win again 6-4 on Sunday. WTH, she'd ask. If the Braves are better then why did they get their ass kicked on Saturday? I would try to explain that there's a lot of randomness, which is why they play 162 games, etc etc. Then why the hell did I spend sixty dollars to sit here for four hours tonight? she'd ask, which is a question for which there is no great answer.

Basketball and hockey have grotesquely long regular seasons, but at least their individual games have lots of action. Football has a crapload of standing around and grossly long games, but at least they have the tension of every game feeling critical. Soccer has more or less a two-hour hard limit. Baseball really has all the worst of all worlds in that way. But what baseball offers is the immense pleasure available from watching those awful late 80s Braves teams develop, bit by bit and night by night and player by player, into a frigging juggernaut. Ron Gant was like a butterfly opening. John Smoltz was a head case and then he was a warrior. Dave Justice was a shlthead who backed it up. The Dale Murphy trade was a frigging Greek tragedy. Etc. And now this franchise has a chance to do it all again, more or less, which is tremendously exciting. But none of that is something that you can just really dip into casually and enjoy.
 
#9,685
#9,685
0zrMtJ.gif


Ole Scott when he gets on his Trout rants
 
New posts
Status
Not open for further replies.

VN Store



Back
Top