A Rant...of Sorts

The next month for the Braves is rather indicative of whether they believe themselves to be true playoff contenders or pretenders hoping to blow up a team and start fresh.  There has been plenty of frustration going around knowing that the Braves were supposed to be a good team, possibly contending with the Phillies for the NL East crown.  The pitching surely has been superb and definitely in the talks for Top 3 in the NL.  The hitting, fielding, defense, and baserunning leave a lot more to be desired.  As I address in the post yesterday, there are quite a few things that they have to show to me in the next month to make me believe that this team isn't simply a product of an above average pitching staff throwing like an elite pitching staff.

The normal statements that I've received about the deadline that I've placed on the Braves are in the range of "They're only 3.5 games out of 1st and they're above .500."  This is fine.  In fact, I am proud that the Braves are playing well.  However, they are and have been hitting like they're supposed to be a sub-.500 team and they would be if the pitching staff didn't go on a tear through the first two weeks in May.  

My rant would go something like this.

My boss puts me in charge of a set of people and I begin to teach them things that were incorrect and I repeated those points despite the fact that they were incorrect.  My boss would not catch this right away because there would not be results showing that there were any problems that could be shown to be my fault.  However, after receiving the first quarter reports, he notices that the statistics he is given are not at all what they should be.  He notes it within my review, from the people that I've been put in charge of to train.

Regardless of whether I knew that I did the wrong thing or not, wouldn't I still be at fault for leading my employees down a wrong path?  In my opinion, within a business or within a dugout, these stories would be the same.  

Larry Parrish, the Braves' hitting coach, seems to have been preaching aggressiveness as stats have shown that many of the Braves' hitters have been more aggressively swinging at pitches that are out of the zone.  By swinging at pitches out of the zone, most hitters hitters do not strike balls as hard, leading to more groundballs, weak flyballs and popups.  This leads to a lower BABIP and has shown that while the Braves may be hitting some balls hard, they are still not taking the appropriate measures swing at the right pitches.  This comes right down to the hitting coach and staff to notice the wrong and fix it.  

Now, maybe Parrish and Fredi Gonzalez have not noticed it yet.  If they haven't, they surely aren't doing their jobs well.  Maybe they do not believe the sample size and think it is particularly bad luck, which pretty much also means they aren't doing their jobs well, or exhausting every possible method to figure out what's wrong.  In any case, it is hard to believe that, while nearly every single Braves hitter is performing under their projected numbers and their career average, there won't be any kinds of changes over the next month.  What changes may come, of coaching personnel or with a change in hitting philosophy, we'll just have to wait and see.