03 September 2016

Please God, Deliver Us From This

I know they're the worst team in Major League Baseball this year (the Twins' August swoon notwithstanding), but don't the Atlanta Braves owe their audience some professionalism off the field?

Look, I get it: the pre-game show is the sub-basement of sports announcing. And I get that doing 162 of them -- particularly for a franchise that mailed in 2016 before it started -- has got to wear on a guy.

And I understand that ignorant and uninformed are trendy these days. And since the subject of this diatribe is a vote, I see the parallel.

Your Atlanta Braves Radio Network
But that doesn't excuse the kind of stupid that I thought was cured by now. Announcers on the team's radio network, which spans the entire Southeast from Florida to Kentucky, should know more about baseball than a time traveler from 1933, don't you think?

So that brings us to Ben Ingram, Chris Dimino and Buck Belue, the Braves' pre-game announcers earlier this week. Why I was listening to this offering in the first place is another story that I'm not proud of. (I was washing dishes during a tropical storm that closed the library and precluded TV watching.)

To begin with, let's acknowledge that Buck Belue was a star quarterback at Georgia 1981-1983 and Chris Dimino is a New Joisey guy who got hired to sports talk radio in 1993 after calling repeatedly and arguing with the hosts. This isn't Baseball Mensa to begin with.

Veteran Leadership >> Hitting, Fielding, Baserunning
The trio was discussing the post-season awards with common dopiness -- Anthony Rizzo's RBIs (duh, he bats behind Kris Bryant), Jake Arrieta's pitching wins, teammates dividing votes, that sort of thing. I shook my head and listened, bemused.

In a discussion about the AL MVP, the name Mike Trout -- you know, the actual MVP -- never came up. The Mike who came up was Napoli, who after all, is providing 29 home runs and veteran leadership to the first place Indians. ("He really has them playing great," said Dimino.) That Napoli is a butcher in the field, runs like a Yugo, and sports a middling .345 OBP is apparently of little magnitude to the on-air trio; he's an MVP contender because he's a good coach.

Evidently first base coach Sandy Alomar doesn't slap tushies the right way. Hitting coach Ty Van Burkelo smokes cigarettes and snoozes during batting practice. Manager Terry Francona isn't doing his job. Without Mike Napoli's veteran leadership the team would be adrift.

Time To Move Beyond 1977
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts. Napoli is seventh on the Indians in Wins Against Replacement. With his one signature skill, he has four more homers than Trout. To get there, he's cost his team 47 more outs, stroked a dozen fewer doubles and triples, stolen 14 fewer net bases and cost his team 2.6 losses in the field relative to Trout. Trout's WAR, according to Baseball Reference, is 8.8; Napoli's is 1.0.

If the people talking about the games employed by a Major League team haven't a clue, how are the fans supposed to learn anything?

Thirty-nine years and counting...


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