LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Brian McCann is ready to finger point. Pitchers, catchers and one unsparing critic reported first to the Braves’ otherwise fantasy-based spring-training camp.
The evolving leader of this team just spent the most reflective offseason of his baseball life.
“The most I ever sat and pondered over a season since I started playing baseball,” McCann said.
After deep contemplation — along with plenty of offseason golf and vacations to Las Vegas and the Bahamas — he was sure he had arrived at the root cause of the Braves’ epic September belly-flop. By the time he came south, he was prepared to sling a little blame.
It was him.
Not the hurricane in New York that broke the team’s momentum. Not the injuries to starters Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens. Not the sapping of the bullpen.
All him. He’s Spartacus.
“I truly felt if I played up to my standards, the Cardinals don’t get in the postseason,” McCann said.
The Braves, of course, bled out slowly last season, going 10-20 down the stretch, losing in extra innings on the final day to open the door for St. Louis’ World Series run.
From the heart of the lineup, McCann certainly contributed to that September to dismember. After returning, perhaps too soon, from one of those ubiquitous oblique injuries in mid-August, he went from having potentially the best offensive season of his career to the most profound slump of his life. He hit .180 over the last six weeks, flailing to the end.
Good parts of this spring will be spent reliving that ordeal.
“I’ll answer [questions about the collapse], if that’s what you guys want to hear,” he shrugged.
“It’s expected. You have to answer those questions.”
He arrived on Disney property well prepared for the inquisition and equally prepared to underscore his role in the debacle.
While pitcher Tim Hudson, in a typically colorful manner, labeled the lost 10 1/2- game wild-card lead “a total team stooge move,” his catcher decided he should wear the whole thing.
Because some things just are not supposed to happen:
Travolta doesn’t make “Battlefield Earth.”
McCartney doesn’t do “Silly Love Songs.”
Sandra Bullock doesn’t marry Jesse James.
And McCann doesn’t slump.
The familiar fails him
Life’s little mysteries lose their charm when they make you question bedrock fundamentals. For McCann, what was shaken was the gospel of hitting, as preached by his father.
“I never thought that would ever happen to me on a baseball field, where I went back to all the [hitting] checkpoints I’ve had my entire life to be successful, and they just didn’t work out,” McCann said.
Here was a player who so quickly grew into the National League’s best-hitting catcher, a six-time All Star, the winner of five of the past six Silver Slugger awards as the best offensive performer at his position. He claimed that award again last season, even after the September flame-out.
And even Howie McCann couldn’t fix him. His father, a former college coach who teaches the fine art of hitting in Alpharetta, has always had the answers. He identified Brian as a catcher back when he was only 7, playing on another field.
“When they played soccer, Brad [Brian’s older brother] ran like a deer, he’d be scoring three goals a game. And where did they put Brian? In goal. I knew we had a catcher,” Howie said.
“My dad knew what he was doing,” Brian said. “He knew that I ain’t going up against Roberto Alomar at second base.
“I got to the bigs at 21 years old, and 100 percent of that is because I caught.”
Dad installed all the requisite toughness to handle whatever would come. If there was a day young Brian felt like taking off because of his legs were tired, Howie would challenge him with the question: How you going to play 162 games one day if you can’t take BP today?
It all had always worked before. Before the close of last season, McCann’s idea of a slump was a couple of weeks of hitting around .200, “but never going six weeks and having consistently poor at-bats.” That speaks loudly to the kind of consistent hitter McCann has always been.
That consistency abandoned him, however, when he needed it most last year. Howie couldn’t believe that was his boy out there, swinging off his front foot, lunging at the plate. Third-base coach Brian Snitker, who had accompanied McCann up through the minors, told manager Fredi Gonzalez he had never seen McCann struggle so much. Welcome to a new low, B-Mac.
The theory from some of those around him is that McCann rushed back too quickly from his injury, never adequately knocking off the rust from the 16 games he missed in late July/early August. He kept insisting the oblique was fine, but others wondered if it didn’t nag him to the end.
In trying to repurpose the collapse of 2011 into something useful, McCann said he learned he needs to ration his energy more wisely. Perhaps now on his off-days he won’t shag fly balls in warm-ups. Now he’ll let himself relax between games.
All-around catcher
The importance of McCann to the Braves has never been clearer. The guy who initially was cast as Jeff Francoeur’s sidekick has been promoted to the team’s most important position player. (One the Braves will need to deal with when his current contract runs out after a 2013 option year).
The hitting has, until most recently, been a constant. But among the other facets that go along with the catching gig, orchestrating a game from behind the plate is the one that seems to most stir McCann’s imagination. Get him talking about what it takes to set up a professional hitter and buckle in for what is to him a lengthy, impassioned seminar.
“I think he has gotten so much better at [calling a game from behind the plate],” Gonzalez said. “He has taken pride and ownership of that pitching staff.”
McCann’s backup, David Ross, is known as the “defensive one,” the one more likely to throw out a base stealer, the one who would rather give up a kidney then let a pitch get by him. He has been a strong influence on his more noted teammate — “one of the best things that happened to me,” McCann said.
Yet, when asked to return the compliment, Ross doesn’t go right to the obvious asset of McCann’s bat. What most impresses Ross is, “How much he cares.”
“He cares so much about the pitcher and the game. He stays locked in. He makes guys better by how much he cares,” Ross said.
“No one questions whether he has his heart in calling a game. You have to be like that, but the ones who are really good hitters usually can’t be. They can’t do that because their main job is to hit. He doesn’t do that. He takes a lot of pride in his catching.”
McCann’s development as an all-around presence for the Braves since being called up in 2005 has been certain and steady.
And now there is a clear indication of how McCann reacts when there is a dip in that career arc, when a season goes horribly wrong and there is fault to find all around him. That’s when he will drop the mask, pick up the mirror and find it.
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