I feel like I’ve been in a little bit of a writing rut lately, but at the same time I never like to go too long without having written something at all. When times like this, I tend to fall back onto topics that are easy for me to ramble about like wrestling, or in this case, baseball.
No, it’s not about the Astros and their cheating scandal, although it seems very foreboding for the franchise, due to the overwhelming amount of evidence that backs it up, not to mention the fact that former pitcher Mike Fiers literally tattled on them to the press.
I was reading this article about how a current president, CEO and investor stooge-slave of the Atlanta Braves, Mike Plant, is all optimistic about the future of the Braves and their future success, and as is often the case whenever I read bullshit like this, it makes my eyes roll, but at the same time, it occasionally inspires words to formulate in my head, and then through my fingers and then into a word doc.
Of course Plant is going to say a bunch of optimistic shit to quell investors. Why would he say stuff like “ehh, the Braves are going to be a perfectly adequate .500+ team, but realistically speaking we don’t have the pitching to compete in the playoffs, nor the talent to carry us beyond the NLDS?”
Instead, he extols the positive bean counts of how well the attendance and television ratings were, and the sponsorship revenue, and the overall profits that the organization is raking in, but not turning around and spending on the team itself.
Somewhere along the lines, the Braves appear to have forgotten that success isn’t really measured in spreadsheets and profit, but in championship banners and Commissioner’s Trophies; and that succeeding with the latter typically results in massive successes with the former. I would wager money that the Cubs blowing open the bank in 2016, the Astros ponying up in 2017, the Red Sox spending like they always do in 2018, and the Nationals paying their pitchers what the Braves spent on their whole team in 2019, result in way more ROI than the Braves have done, playing it safe and by their completely unnecessary corporate spending limits.
I’d also wager money on this bet:
We’re set up to win, and we’re going to go after it,” longtime Braves executive Mike Plant, now president and CEO of Braves Development Company, told the attendees. “I can assure you that one of these years I’m going to stand up here and have a World Series trophy with me.
Mike, I bet you won’t have a World Series trophy with you, ever. Unless another team lets you hold it while you’re interviewing for another MLB executive job when the Braves shit-can you, or you resign from being a scapegoat for inevitable poor results.
But it’s downright laughable that Plant seems to think that the Braves have any chance in hell at ever winning another World Series in the next lifetime, doing now, what they’ve been doing since the team sold to Liberty Media back in 2008; operating within strict budgets that place the team in the lower half of spenders, and insisting that they can achieve 100% success with 80% talent when every champion over the last two decades have been amassing as close to 200% talent as they could.
Saying it’s because the success of the surrounding real estate and the rise in attendance is hilarious too; it doesn’t take a genius to know that there’s zero correlation to these things and baseball team success, unless the team were to take the profits that come with the success of the real estate and actually invest it back into the team that draws the people there in the first place, but everyone also knows that that’s just now what the Braves do. The Braves Way, so to say.
It would all be like me getting an automated litter box for the cats at my house, and saying that it’s laying the groundwork down for me to rise in the ranks of my job and become a spineless shithead of a vice president, but at least I’d be pulling in six figures.
Man, as much as I love the Braves, I fucking hate them all the same sometimes. But at least when I’m fired up, it gets me in the mood to write occasionally, so I suppose there are definitely worse things in existence.
