Hied ourselves to Atlanta for Braves-Marlins on Independence Day weekend. Jose Fernandez versus Lucas Harrel making his Braves debut. It was 9-1, just as you expected, except Fernandez was the smoked, not the smoker.
Baseball's a crazy game.
Some more oddness I observed:
• There are six or eight young women in every major American market who can list their summer job as "professional ballpark waver." At the Braves game we witnessed, these women walked onto the field for all the pre-game and between-inning promotions and did the following: smiled and waved to the crowd. Occasionally they held signs. So what are the qualifications for this position? How do they distinguish among the 200 pretty, young female applicants to determine which half-dozen would become professional wavers? Wrist pronation ability?
• Organist Matt Kaminski, who plays the walk-up music for opposing players, is a comedic genius. He played "We're Off To See the Wizard" for Marcell Ozuna and "Jesus Is Just All Right With Me" for Christian Yelich. Matt, I want you to know that I got the jokes and was richly amused.
• I was shocked to see Jose Fernandez loaf on the basepaths after bunting early in the game. The Braves had trouble handling the ball and barely threw him out, so he would have been safe had he hustled. How does a manager allow that? I hoped he was nursing a leg injury, and the way he pitched, he might have been. More shocking: Ichiro jogged after a key base hit in the sixth inning. The runners moved up an extra base and Atlanta ended up scoring seven in the frame and breaking the game open. I would like to see a manager walk onto the field a la Bobby Cox and remove a player for lollygagging.
• The umpires reviewed a close play at first early in the game. It took them several minutes to decide
whether the runner beat the throw. There should be a new rule: if they can't determine a call after three slow-motion replays it's too close to matter. Uphold the call and move on. As it was, after three minutes of review, it's very likely they got it wrong.
• There's nothing more annoying at an MLB game than the incessant, inane, commercial video chatter between innings at decibel levels designed to drown out passing aircraft. It nearly ruined my experience last year in Detroit and Cincinnati. In Atlanta, it was much more subdued. Note to league: can that crap.
• Based on one pinch hit at-bat, there is something wrong with Giancarlo Stanton. Dude fanned on three Little League swings. He looked like his own grandfather, not that I've ever seen the gentleman.
• At every home game, the Braves make a big show of replacing the number on the outfield wall
corresponding to how many MLB games are left at Turner Field. How tone deaf can you be? This is an abomination. The franchise is costing local residents something in the area of a billion dollars by ditching a perfectly fine 20-year-old stadium and conning a local suburb into building them a sparkling new many-hundred-million-dollar edifice. Hey Marietta: get a 50-year lease.
• Prior to the game, a local country act performed in the area of Turner that might be called the lobby or atrium. Wife and I stood 10 feet away and commented to each other on the fine craftsmanship. At one point I asked her, "why couldn't these two songs be hits on the country charts?" See, I'd never heard of John Berry before. Now I have. The songs were She's Taken A Shine and What's In It for Me, which reached #2 and #5 respectively on the country charts. Then Berry performed the national anthem on his guitar and slayed it.
• In days of yore, a kid went to a Major League game in the hopes of catching a foul ball. Today, kids dream of seeing themselves on the video board. So teams oblige by showing waving, screaming, shimmying, incredulous kids on the board every chance they get. This is a most bizarre phenomenon; don't these kids know what they look like?
• The new video boards provide so much awesome information, like real time updates on out-of-town games and background on the batter and pitcher. I really appreciate that. But c'mon Braves, how about entering the 21st century and provide OBP and SLG. Sure, Ichiro is batting .340, woo-woo, but he hasn't worked a walk since the NBA playoffs started.
• Contrary to popular belief, there is no Augusta, GA. We stopped on the way home for a stroll on the River Walk along the Savannah River. Then we GPS'd downtown and it took us to -- nothing. We GPS'd City Hall and it's -- nowhere. We found a street that looked like it might bustle but it was two blocks long and ceased to exist if you turned any corner. This is a city of 200,000 residents. Not a single exit sign on the highway directs traffic "downtown." They did have a nice mall with a Whole Foods on the fringes of the "city" though. And a Moe's. Welcome to Moe's!
Baseball events have continued apace despite a Braindrizzling hiatus. How can that be? Perhaps Joe Posnanski kept things afloat in the interim.
The Cy Young Awards were announced this week. There's not a whole lot of room for debate on Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer. Kershaw led the planet in ERA, and that includes Little League. Scherzer's 21-3 record and nearly six runs of support per start don't accrue to his credit, but he shouldn't be penalized for them either. Scherzer gets the prize because he dominated AL batters to the tune of a nifty 2.90 ERA, 240 strikeouts in 214 innings, and a best-in-class .97 WHIP.
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The same for Rookie of the Year awards. The trophy would have gone to Yasiel Puig in almost any other year. He punched balls all over the yard, 60% better than league average, and added dynamite to a moribund Dodger offense when he arrived. In years when such luminaries as Geovany Soto, Jason Jennings, Angel Berroa and Bobby Crosby earned top honors, Puig would have run away. Sadly for him, his freshman season coincided with Jose Fernandez's, which awoke ghosts of Fernandomania en route to a 12-6, 2.19 with more whiffs than frames pitched.
In the AL, Wil Myers and his .293/.354/.478 in slightly more than half a season was the pretty clear choice over shortstop Jose Iglesias and a couple of nice pitchers. In all, not much to complain about.
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The MVP Awards went as expected to Andrew McCutchen and Miguel Cabrera. Both were excellent choices. That Cabrera wasn't the best choice doesn't change the fact that he had another MVP-caliber season. It's difficult to be disappointed when a great candidate, the second-best of the league's 600 players, secures the honor. It's easy to be disappointed that Major League baseball writers don't know the difference between a great hitter and a great player, and can't fathom how one player's value isn't dependent on the performances of his teammates, but if being disappointed in baseball writers were a virus, we'd all have a permanent case of Ebola.
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You probably heard that teams made $14.1 million qualifying offers to 13 players, every one of which was declined. This is a ritual dance carried out by GMs and players under the new collective bargaining agreement. The players are now free agents who may seek multi-year deals. The teams may or may not want the players back but they will receive compensation draft picks if their former player is signed elsewhere.
Let's take the case of Braves backstop Brian McCann. The Georgia native is leaving by mutual decision, a net benefit for both him and the team even if he inks a five-year, $12 million/year deal with a catcher-starved franchise. (Hello Yankees! By the way, $12 mil is going to be cat pee compared to what McCann commands.) That serves McCann, who at 29 is headed into his decline years, but would guarantee the McCann family $60 million, rather than $14.1 million. It serves the good people of Atlanta -- or Marietta -- because the Braves have cheaper options and serious budget constraints. Leading the parade to replace the seven-time All-Star is Evan Gattis, whose above-average hitting comes with a half-million-dollar price tag and whose value is much greater behind the plate than in left field, where he attempted to hide in 2013. In addition, Atlanta would receive a first round supplemental pick from the signing team.
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Speaking of the Braves, they've flipped Turner Field into the trashcan after just 17 years, like it's a disposable lighter. Shame on the the various entities (which included NBC and the Atlanta Olympic Authority) for paying the massive retrofit costs to turn Centennial Olympic Stadium into Turner Field without requiring the Braves to sign a long-term lease.
The franchise and its new hosts, suburban Cobb County, claim the new home will be a "public-private partnership." This is code for an arrangement in which the public pays the bill and the team reaps the benefits.
In most "public-private" arrangements around sports stadiums, municipalities foot the bill and then lend their borrowing authority to the team for a portion of the costs. The team repays its loan at a discounted rate because the bonds are low-interest and tax-free. The municipality restricts its future borrowing ability for things like schools, hospitals, sewer systems and infrastructure that teams regularly complain about.
Many econometric studies have demonstrated that even after accounting for all the possible spending resulting from relocated sports teams, municipalities rarely earn back the value of their investments in stadiums unless those edifices are key cogs in new downtown development. Baseball teams are relatively smal businesses whose payrolls generally leave the state from November through March. The stadiums lay empty roughly 250 days-a-year and their use often generates as many costs for the city as tax income, all while the bonds demand repayment.
So the Braves will begin play in their third home in 21 years when they move to Marietta while the Red Sox have competed in the Fens for more than a century.
• In days of yore, a kid went to a Major League game in the hopes of catching a foul ball. Today, kids dream of seeing themselves on the video board. So teams oblige by showing waving, screaming, shimmying, incredulous kids on the board every chance they get. This is a most bizarre phenomenon; don't these kids know what they look like? 
