39:Patience, Practice and the Past

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by Berigan

JONESBORO, GA – Patience is a virtue we are all told…seems to be a provable fact. And it’s always in style. Just like the bell bottoms I am wearing now.

Patience is a virtue in Baseball as well. Fielders learn to not charge every single ground ball. They learn that sometimes, you should let the ball come to them, instead of getting it on the in-between hop. Some teams appear to have a system wide policy of teaching patience at the plate. Teaching players that they don’t need to try to win the game on every pitch thrown near the strike zone. That not swinging against pitchers that walk a lot, might just get you that fat pitch you desire…if you are patient. AL teams in particular get that today, more than ever, teams that don’t swing at the first pitch, that work deep counts, wear down a starting pitcher, and can get to the weak underbelly of most teams, their middle relief.

Practice is also a virtue. The best musicians in the world practice for hours a day. Frank Sinatra saw a gray haired Benny Goodman practicing before a concert and said to him, “Benny, why do you practice so much? After all, you’ve been playing for decades!!!” Benny’s answer was “Because when I am not great, I am just good.”

Another example is WC Fields. Fields was a world class juggler before he was a world class comedian. He said this about the early days: “I still carry scars on my legs from these early attempts at juggling. I’d balance a stick on my toe, toss it into the air, and try to catch it again on my toe. Hour after hour the damned thing would bang against my shinbones. I’d work until tears were streaming down my face. But I kept on practicing, and bleeding, until I perfected the trick.”

Gil in Mechanicsville said on the 2nd of April on the B&S. “Practice does not make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect.”

I don’t believe players need to leave blood on the grass at Turner Field, but…do Braves players drill as much as the best defensive teams like the Rockies or Red Sox do??? It can’t just be dumb luck or the drafting good fielders that allowed the Rockies tied the NL record for fewest errors (68), right?

Does everyone on the team spend 5-10 minutes a day in the indoor batting cages working on bunting???

Since the Braves made a lot of errors in spring training, is it wrong to spend more time working on the fundamentals after a bad game once the season starts??? Surely you can say it nicely to the players, that right now they look more than rusty, lets spend an extra hour before a game working on hitting cut the cut off man, or practicing making deep throws deep in the hole, or digging balls out of the dirt at first. Isn’t a reason we have so many coaches, is to you know….coach???

I know, everyone is expected to be a professional at this level. They should know how to do the little things, like bunt and move runners over…but…when your team has had a nearly 2 decade long problem scoring runs in big games…don’t you work extra hard on bunting, base-running, trying to move runners over, outside of the month of March???

The Past has it’s virtues as well. Nothing wrong with the past. This team has a great past! But, a team should look closely at it’s past, to see what worked, and what doesn’t work anymore. Does everyone from the GM on down look to find ways to improve the way this particular team plays between the lines??? Are we playing “modern” baseball?? Or do we chalk up the problems getting deep in the playoffs to just bad luck???

As I mentioned before, teams like the Red Sox (2 WC sweeps in the past 4 years) and Yankees (13th straight playoff berths) today take a lot of pitches, yet you don’t seem to see their players take a lot of called strike 3’s. Haven’t heard, but I do wonder if they have meetings before games and run down a few basic stats with their players. Pitcher X, 72% of the time will start with a breaking pitch away. 59% are out of the zone. They are doing something this Braves team isn’t doing.

Sure, these teams have a lot of money, more than anyone else. But, that alone won’t win the World Series for you. All I know is, when we played teams like the Red Sox or Tigers last year, we didn’t look like we belonged on the same field with them. Was that only our starting pitching????

I bet teams like the Red Sox, that seem to have a forward look in their approach to bringing up young pitchers (and how to handle older ones like Shilling) are better at finding new ways of getting an advantage over their opponents than other teams in baseball.

The Braves of 2008 are a vastly improved team over the 2007 model, at least from a pure talent perspective. If the Braves don’t win it all this year, or don’t even get into the playoffs, it won’t be because of a lack of talent.

~Berigan~

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