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Even though I don\u2019t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as much as I used to, it can\u2019t be said that I don\u2019t know the Atlanta Braves.\u00a0 Going into the offseason it was painfully obvious what the team\u2019s needs were, which was pitching, pitching, pitching and moar pitching, because as the Braves were painfully exploited, their lack of pitching absolutely blew up in their face once the playoffs began.<\/span><\/p>\n They might have had the greatest offense in a century, and even with Ronald Acu\u00f1a pulling a disappearing act in the playoffs, you can\u2019t win baseball games if you can\u2019t prevent the other team from scoring more runs than you do.<\/span><\/p>\n But in spite of the very obvious glaring need, I what was going to happen to the Braves before the offseason even really began.\u00a0 Their name would be thrown into the hat on just about every notable starting pitching candidate, but one-by-one, they would lose in every single sweepstakes, usually because the Braves were too cheap, or unwilling to outbid any competitive suitors in terms of money or trade chips.\u00a0 And once all the major names were off the board, the Braves would then land on picking up a starting pitcher that was too old, coming off injury\/down year, both, or some other reason that made them available to the Braves and not all the other teams who are willing to dole out money like white people raising taxes on minorities.<\/span><\/p>\n And the Braves front office would pat themselves on the back and applaud themselves for not going over-budget, not locking themselves to a free agent contract that has any modicum of chance of being labeled a colossal bust, and then the contingent of Barves fans who believe Alex Anthopolous or any of the other Braves\u2019 front office stooges are incapable of making bad business decisions with applaud them to, and the Braves will go into 2024, not a terrible team, but not exactly the world beaters that are expected to compete for the World Series.<\/span><\/p>\n Sure enough, that\u2019s pretty much exactly what happened this off-season, and absolutely nothing that has transpired throughout the entire baseball winter has been a surprise to me, as it pertains to the Atlanta Braves.<\/span><\/p>\n To quickly summarize, the Braves\u2019 name was associated to quality pitchers like Aaron Nola, Sonny Gray, Tyler Glasnow, Dylan Cease and even lol, Shohei Ohtani.\u00a0 Nola used the Braves to leverage moar money before re-signing with the Phillies.\u00a0 Sonny Gray signed a fairly reasonable deal with the St. Louis Cardinals so it stands to believe the Braves probably low-balled him and he joined a rebuilding Cards squad instead.\u00a0 Dylan Cease talks appear to have evaporated for the time being, so the Braves probably were not willing to acquiesce on whatever the White Sox wanted from them, and not only did the Dodgers naturally win the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes, days later they managed to swipe Tyler Glasnow from the Rays and secure him for several years, before doing the same thing with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, building a monster super squad in the process.<\/span><\/p>\n So with one part of my predicted Braves offseason complete, the second part came to fruition when the Braves traded one of their better prospects, Vaughn Grissom, to the Boston Red Sox for, Chris Sale.<\/span><\/p>\n A decade ago, landing Chris Sale would\u2019ve been a boon, because he was easily one of the best pitchers in the game in the 2010\u2019s decade.\u00a0 But here\u2019s a guy that almost as soon as he turned 30 years old, fell off a cliff.\u00a0 His numbers started plummeting, he blew out his arm and required Tommy John Surgery, and has been battling a parade of random injuries since then.\u00a0 He did manage to pitch over 100 innings last season, but to a far less effective 4.30 ERA than when he was still good at baseball.\u00a0 His strikeout rates were still decent, but he was getting hammered when people did connect, allowing 15 homers in his limited duties.<\/span><\/p>\n The Braves landing Chris Sale at the expense of a prospect the caliber of Vaughn Grissom, I told my friend, was about the most Braves transaction ever, because it truly was.\u00a0 They biffed on all of the available high-tier starting pitching options, and then settled on getting a high-risk, formerly-good player, because of cost, and with a litany of hopes and dreams attached that he can bounce back to being the dominant force he was throughout the 2010\u2019s, a decade later and through tons of injuries.<\/span><\/p>\n And to make matters worse, they locked themselves into this union by extending him for two more years at $38 million, and I\u2019m too lazy to look up the specifics, prior to this, they were only on the hook for around $500k of his 2024 salary, while the Red Sox had to pay the rest, but I\u2019m assuming that that\u2019s no longer the case with a new contract in tow.<\/span><\/p>\n But basically, the modus operandi of the Atlanta Braves is always avoid the risk of high-cost assets, even if means the team as a whole is hampered by mediocre alternatives.\u00a0 They will never splurge on top-tier talent, and always pick up guys who are coming off of down years, injuries, or assumed to just be needing \u201ca change of scenery.\u201d\u00a0 The Braves always seem to think they can always operate by getting okay talent and that they\u2019ll magically outperform their expectations because they\u2019re playing for the high and mighty Atlanta Braves, which is fine if you went into every single year with no aspirations other than not sucking.<\/span><\/p>\n They\u2019re basically the High-Expectations Asian Dad of baseball, where they\u2019re always banking on everyone to outperform their peripherals and history, and are full of nothing but loathing disappointment if and when they don\u2019t succeed.<\/span><\/p>\n The Braves haven\u2019t really played with their balls out since Ted Turner unloaded the team to Liberty Media, and Braves Corporate hasn\u2019t shown that they don\u2019t care about on-field results as much as they care about appeasing the shareholders, so I guess if that\u2019s their goal, then they\u2019re doing a bang-up job of being above average.<\/span><\/p>\n Seriously though, Chris Sale and Jarred Kelenic aren\u2019t going to fix the team and get them any closer to getting over the hurdle of the October Phillies or any other playoff team they run into, should they even make the playoffs in 2024.\u00a0 As good as Spencer Strider has been, it\u2019s been two straight Octobers in which he\u2019s faltered, Charlie Morton isn\u2019t getting any younger, Chris Sale is still a gigantic question mark on what we\u2019re going to get from an older, busted up version, and Max Fried might be the only reliable pitcher the team has, and only because it\u2019s his walk year, and he\u2019s going to be pitching for his next contract.<\/span><\/p>\n Not very promising going into 2024, but then again, I\u2019m not convinced that Braves Corporate really cares about the team\u2019s success as long as the annual report continues to show high profits.\u00a0 But as much as the Braves have sucked throughout yet another offseason, there\u2019s always a measure of satisfaction at knowing that I\u2019m still usually right when it comes to matters pertaining to the Braves being the Barves, and being right always feels good.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Even though I don\u2019t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as much as I used to, it can\u2019t be said that I don\u2019t know the Atlanta Braves.\u00a0 Going into the offseason it was painfully obvious what the team\u2019s needs were, which was pitching, pitching, pitching and moar pitching, because as the Braves were painfully … Continue reading The Braves are the High Expectations Asian Dad of MLB<\/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":[196,62,66,79,191,78,58,190],"class_list":["post-49746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-barves","tag-baseball","tag-braves","tag-cashmoney","tag-greed","tag-lowered-expectations","tag-sports","tag-white-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49746","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=49746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49748,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49746\/revisions\/49748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}