Here at the dawn of short attention span baseball, the season reduced from a soliloquy to a hiccup, one must recalibrate one’s outlook.
Take, for instance, the old sports bromide – “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.” Now shred that. In a 60-game, virus-shortened baseball season, the comforting idea that somehow time is on your side is passe.
Now, it’s very much how you start ... or you may be finished.
In the increased gravity of a 60-game schedule, as opposed to the 162-game one that was instituted nearly 60 years ago, each game bears more than twice the usual weight (2.7 times the weight to be precise). Consider that the Nationals played 17 postseason games last year, which would comprise close to 30% of this regular season.
So, yes, we’ll be working very much under playoff-like urgencies. And come July 24 in Flushing, if it turns out that the Mets’ Jacob deGrom is fit enough (he felt some back tightness Wednesday) to face the Braves’ Mike Soroka, the opener will have an uncommon edge to it.
In such a compressed docket, there is no time built in to wait out a slump, to nurse an injury or to bring along gradually a tender young talent. Losing streaks just got a whole lot more worrisome.
As the Braves get ready to break from the starting gate, they, like every other team in this compromised season, must avoid faltering at the break.
Just as some people are not morning people, some baseball players naturally start slow. Take Braves new catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who over six-plus seasons has hit .205 for the months of April and May and .257 the rest of the way. His two lowest monthly OPS numbers show themselves in the first two full months of the season.
Two very important players – first baseman Freddie Freeman and closer Will Smith – are great looming question marks at the start not because of their tendencies but because of the scary new variable of COVID-19. Both tested positive and missed the team’s summer camp. When well, Freeman is a model of consistency whose first-half-of-the-season OPS (.899) is just a slight bit better than his second half (.863). But who knows how anyone will react when coming back from this confounding virus?
Just days away from a season unlike any other – one with no guarantee of completion – here’s how two specific Braves players are approaching the start. They come at this from opposite perspectives, one who began last season in the best way imaginable, the other with a record of taking a while to warm up, like green wood on a campfire.
The Good-from-the-Get-Go Kid
Soroka knows that during a warped season you will get warped numbers. “You look around and you understand in a 60-game season there are going to be some silly stats thrown out,” he said. He should know. Few young players have done more with the brief sample size than he.
At 21 years old a season ago, Soroka was just plain silly at the outset. Not on the Opening Day roster, he was called up to make his first start of the season on April 18. Just like that, through his first 10 starts of 2019, Soroka was 7-1 with a 1.38 ERA. And 8-1 with a 2.12 ERA after 12 appearances.
Penciled in as the Braves first Opening Day pitcher not named Teheran since 2013, Soroka also looms as the franchise’s youngest ever Opening Day pitcher.
A dozen or so outings will comprise an entire season for a starter this year, so it seemed logical to ask of Soroka if he felt it possible to duplicate 2019′s beginning and thus pretty much dominate for what is going to be all of 2020.
“I don’t see why not,” he said all matter-of-factly.
He has declared that his stuff has never felt better. And that he put to good use all that down time after spring training was snuffed by the coronavirus. “I found a little more efficiency and was able to work on some things while we were down,” he said. “I got to fiddle around with things that I wanted to learn how to do more consistently.”
In the imprecise laboratory of intrasquad games, Soroka has looked stout thus far. He seems palpably excited about getting to a real game in New York, looking forward, he said, to “hitting that adrenalin that pushes you over the edge, where you can react on instincts, letting it happen rather than trying to make it happen.”
Now, if he can just convince himself it’s 2019 all over again (ah, if only we all could return to how things were then).
“Going back to last year when I got called up, I didn’t know if I was going to make my next start, we were all kind of battling for that spot,” Soroka said. “I’m trying to put myself back in those shoes and understand that the only game that matters is the first game and move on from there. That’s where I need to be to give myself a good chance to do that again.”
Yes, by all means, let’s have a 2019 Soroka redux. The Braves shall count on that, then.
The Name’s Ender, after all, not Beginner
Atop the injuries that centerfielder Ender Inciarte dealt with last season – the menu read back, hamstring, quad – there was the slow start that is something of a specialty in his case.
His first 40 games last year, Inciarte hit .218. Returning for 25 games in July and August before the leg injuries compounded, he hit .293. He’s always been a second-half guy: For his career, he’s hitting .259 during the season’s first half and .314 the second.
Given all that, there is only one way for Inciarte to look at the challenges this short season: Trust the calendar.
“It’s the second half already, that’s my mentality,” he said here in mid-July, what would be early in the second half any other year.
“I miss playing. I’m going to go out there and have some fun just like I was in the second half last year. I’m not going to worry too much about what I’m doing today or tomorrow. Stats are going to take care of themselves. I’m going to go out and try to help the team and whatever (manager Brian Snitker) asks me to do – either playing from the beginning or coming off the bench – and just try to do my best and try to gain that playing time I want.”
The Braves outfield is in flux, with the addition of Marcell Ozuna, the subtraction of Nick Markakis and the pending arrival of Yasiel Puig. Defensively, the Braves could put no one better than Inciarte in center. But they can’t afford to wait for him to heat up offensively should he get off to another slow start.
Inciarte said his legs are strong again, that he is more confident in them than he was during the brief spring training. The swing, he adds, “feels in a good place.”
Normally, his manager is a patient sort, willing to let his veteran players work out their issues in-game, realizing that ebbs and flows are normally just a part of baseball. But normally left town months ago.
All his players, not just Inciarte, will be on a shorter string here in the shorter season. “I would assume they will, that’s just the nature of the beast that we’re handed this year,” Snitker said.
“It might be that we move things around every now and then. You give a guy a crack, if you give him two weeks (to get right) the season is almost over.
“There is going to be a little more sense of urgency in what we’re doing for the fact that it is such a short season. The resources aren’t going to be great as far as the players, you’re going to be kind of playing with what you’ve got and hopefully in those situations we can maybe give a guy a day or two here or there hoping that’s the thing that gets him going.”
Welcome to Major League Baseball in 2020, a shadow of its former self, where the imperative is to go from zero to 60 like a dragster. Those aboard your grandad’s Buick LeSabre will be left behind.
About the Author
