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I was thinking one morning before I started making breakfast for the kids, about how the Braves had lost yet another game to the lowly Nationals, while the Phillies had won another game, adding one more game in the standings over Atlanta.\u00a0 There\u2019s no shortage of shady remarks I could spout, that only come from the type of fan who loves a team to where they have absolutely nothing but snarky vitriol for them, but instead, I actually had what I thought was a great visual representation of how I felt the Braves operated in the MLB landscape.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a scene in the Game of Thrones television show, where Littlefinger smugly tries to educate Cersei Lannister that knowledge is power, only for her to immediately command her guards to grab him and slit his throat, before calling them off, and retorting that power is power.\u00a0 Littlefinger is an arrogant smarmy fuck throughout the series, and it\u2019s always a treat to see someone put him in his place, because it unfortunately does not happen that often.<\/span><\/p>\n The Braves are Littlefinger.\u00a0 They operate in this insulated bubble where they think they\u2019re smarter than all the other teams in Major League Baseball, and are quick to congratulate themselves on irrelevant accolades such as profit, revenue and all things that pertain to how much money they make from all the schmucks who throw money at them.\u00a0 The unspoken part is concurrently how little they re-invest back into the team itself, that ultimately is the product that is meant to generate all that currency in some shape or form.<\/span><\/p>\n They are always convinced that the organization has all the parts they need in order to contend for a World Series, despite the fact that they only have the one from 2021 that was the mother of hot streak luck but then again what World Series winning squad isn\u2019t the same?<\/span><\/p>\n The Braves are tremendously risk-averse to the point where they basically take no risks at all, mainly in the arena of paying a free agent or trading some prospects for a sure-thing good player, and year after year, their biggest weakness is exposed, and they get bounced from the playoffs in the NLDS.<\/span><\/p>\n Meanwhile, all the other contenders in baseball are Cersei and her guards, who represent teams that have their own intelligence in their own rights, but are either less risk averse, or are willing to open up their copiously overflowing wallets because baseball is a massively fucking profitable business venture, or worse off for the Braves, both.<\/span><\/p>\n Non-fans of teams like the Dodgers, Yankees and Phillies are quick to criticize how much money that these teams are spending on free agents and contract extensions, but the proof is in the pudding; all of them are at the top of the standings currently, and are leaps and bounds in the best positions to reach the World Series.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes you have to just stop trying to outsmart everyone, because when everyone is playing chess at the same time, you just have to brute force and fuck everyone else with some money and demonstrate that power is power.<\/span><\/p>\n As much as I criticize the Braves, the truth of the matter is that they are a great organization.\u00a0 General manager Alex Anthopolous is a sharp guy who has lucked into some really fruitful moves that didn\u2019t really sound impressive on paper, but paid out in dividends when they worked out, but it\u2019s obvious that even he\u2019s working with his hands partially tied behind his back, from the stingy purse strings closing the wallet that he\u2019s denied access to.<\/span><\/p>\n With the knowledge that the team does have, they\u2019re competent at fielding a team that\u2019s routinely good enough to make the playoffs, especially now that there are two wild cards, but they constantly run out of gas and\/or have their weaknesses exposed, and crash out at their routinely low ceiling.<\/span><\/p>\n But imagine just how great the Braves could routinely become if they just stopped being so fucking Braves-ey and sobered up from the bullshit The Braves Way™ Koolaid they remain so drunk on.\u00a0 As soon as Spencer Strider went down for the year, pick up Trevor Bauer for the peanuts he\u2019s asking for just for a chance to pitch in MLB.\u00a0 As soon as Ronald Acu\u00f1a went down for the year, pick up the fucking phone and start making some calls, and not assume that an outfield of Jarred Kelenic and Adam Duvall at the corners could cut it.\u00a0 If the team had Bauer, then Schwellenbach or Waldrep could become a valuable trade chip to get someone useful now.<\/span><\/p>\n Fire someone; on any other team in any other sport, a slump like the one the Braves are going through usually results in someone getting fired, regardless of the obvious fact that it\u2019s out of their control that the players aren\u2019t playing well.\u00a0 If the team doesn\u2019t want to axe Brian Snitker, then fire Kevin Seltzer, the hitting coach.\u00a0 Strong arm Chipper Jones to be the interim hitting coach that fans have wanted to see the hitting savant become since the second he retired from the game.<\/span><\/p>\n Stop being so afraid of fucking rentals.\u00a0 Stop being so fucking cheap.\u00a0 Stop believing The Braves Way™ is the only way, because rest assured, it is not.\u00a0 No matter how much I\u2019d prefer power to be power over knowledge, at the very end of the day, baseball, much less any sport, is a crapshoot, once playoffs begin.\u00a0 But if I\u2019m a betting man, the teams that employ more power, tend to be the ones primed to be standing once the postseason begins, and with the way things are now, the Braves and all their Littlefinger knowledge sure as fuck don\u2019t seem primed for anything other than an even earlier postseason exit, in the wild card series; if they even make it at all.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was thinking one morning before I started making breakfast for the kids, about how the Braves had lost yet another game to the lowly Nationals, while the Phillies had won another game, adding one more game in the standings over Atlanta.\u00a0 There\u2019s no shortage of shady remarks I could spout, that only come from … Continue reading There are poor teams, teams that spend, and The Braves Way™<\/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":[196,62,66,79,100,45,90,205,83,58],"class_list":["post-50008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-barves","tag-baseball","tag-braves","tag-cashmoney","tag-comparison","tag-fail","tag-hypocrisy","tag-mlb","tag-observations","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50008","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=50008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50010,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50008\/revisions\/50010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}