{"id":46508,"date":"2019-02-14T19:43:17","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T23:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46508"},"modified":"2020-08-10T19:43:27","modified_gmt":"2020-08-10T23:43:27","slug":"love-this-fire-from-craig-calcaterra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46508","title":{"rendered":"Love this fire from Craig Calcaterra"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Go on, get \u2018em Craig<\/a>: NBC Sports\u2019 Hardball Talk writer Craig Calcaterra lights into the Atlanta Braves front office after their apparent ambivalence for the success of their baseball team<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t follow a tremendous amount of sports as much I once used to, but there are a couple of names that I\u2019ve grown to really enjoy and respect throughout the years.\u00a0 Joe Posnanski and Tom Verducci come to mind pretty quickly, but after reading this scathing editorial by Craig Calcaterra, I have to say that I think he\u2019s ascended to that level of \u201cthis guy often piques my interest, no matter what he\u2019s talking about.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to bother narrating the things that he wrote, because his piece in itself is pretty brilliant, mirrors a lot of the same thoughts that I have about the Atlanta Braves, Major League Baseball and professional sports itself, but I just really want to extol just how much I loved the fire coming from Calcaterra.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s totally right; the Braves are operating as if they think that their fans are idiots.\u00a0 Unfortunately the arrogant front office, most notably represented by president Terry McGuirk and GM Alex Anthopolous, aren\u2019t entirely wrong either; lots of the Braves\u2019 fans are<\/em> idiots.\u00a0 Lots of baseball, and professional sports fans are idiots.\u00a0 Most fans of anything in general are often idiots.\u00a0 Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with some blind faith in the things that people like, but when it comes to analytical thinking, that\u2019s just stuff that some people don\u2019t want to do, and it unfortunately puts them into the category of being idiots, as far as front offices are concerned.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But back to Calcaterra\u2019s editorial about the Braves\u2019 brass, he\u2019s not wrong either.\u00a0 The Braves, in spite of their 2018 success, have shown little interest in trying to achieve more.\u00a0 In fact, if anything at all, it seems more like an inconvenience that the Braves got good so quickly, because it kind of forces the front office\u2019s hand to react to the success, and go against their timeline and try to pretend like they\u2019re acting in accordance to expectations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Long story short, the Braves should for all intents and purposes, be similar to how they were the year prior.\u00a0 They have most of the same components that led them to perform way better than expectations, and get into the playoffs, but they also have made zero strides in trying to improve upon the weaknesses that led them to stutter and falter in the playoffs and advance no further.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even Ray Charles can see that the Braves desperately need another starting pitcher.\u00a0 And there were quite a number of fairly competent pitchers that were available on the market that they basically made no effort to acquire.\u00a0 Somewhere along the line, the team thinks Luis Gohara, a chubby kid who missed more of the season than played in it, is the answer to the woes of the team, when guys like Dallas Keuchel could be gotten. \u00a0And there\u2019s little chance that Nick Markakis has the year he did in 2018 in 2019, but he signed a reasonable deal that isn\u2019t going to hurt them tremendously either.<\/span><\/p>\n

The point of all this is that Calcaterra\u2019s piece pretty much says everything that I\u2019ve ever felt about the Braves, and I\u2019d highly recommend it to anyone who has a modicum of interest in baseball or the Braves.\u00a0 The team has no concern of winning, and is more focused on the day-to-day operations and trying to make as much money as possible with using the least amount of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I get that baseball in itself is a business and that\u2019s ultimately the goal of any business, but I really wish that teams like the Braves would stop crying poor and acting like they\u2019re not in an industry that\u2019s making literal billions of dollars in revenue with each passing season, with no evidence of it slowing down; unless their idiot fans decided to stop being idiots, and then inexplicably and collectively stopped buying tickets, going to games, stopped watching baseball and purchasing merchandise.\u00a0 But because shit like that will never actually happen, the status quo isn\u2019t ever really going to change, and as entertaining as scathing pieces like Calcaterra\u2019s was, nothing will ever change.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Go on, get \u2018em Craig: NBC Sports\u2019 Hardball Talk writer Craig Calcaterra lights into the Atlanta Braves front office after their apparent ambivalence for the success of their baseball team I don\u2019t follow a tremendous amount of sports as much I once used to, but there are a couple of names that I\u2019ve grown to … Continue reading Love this fire from Craig Calcaterra<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,66,79,45,110],"class_list":["post-46508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-baseball","tag-braves","tag-cashmoney","tag-fail","tag-tradition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46510,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46508\/revisions\/46510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}