Smoltz stays cool at Coors

[braves guru]

Denver — When you've won 196 games in the major leagues, you learn things. Like how not to be fazed by early deficits, particularly at a place like Coors Field. Atlanta trailed 2-0 after John Smoltz threw his seventh pitch Saturday night, but the Braves and their veteran ace would bend but wouldn't break for the rest of the night in a 6-2 win against the Colorado Rockies. The Braves made the most of six hits, and Smoltz (3-1) settled in and threw seven solid innings (two runs, nine hits) to move within four wins of 200 in a career spent entirely with one big league team.

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[Chief]

Smoltz is going to end the year with 200+ wins, 150+ Saves and maybe 3,000 strikeouts. I'd say that qualifies as Hall of Fame credentials.

 

[Vercingetorix]

Smoltz is a Hall of Famer right now. If he tore something thowing on the side this afternoon, he'd still go in. And if the Braves hadn't inexplicably left him out in the bullpen for years after it was obvious his arm was going to be okay, he'd have a pretty good shot at 300 wins too.

 

[Chief]

I don't think you can really blame the Braves for leaving him in the bullpen. He probably had one of the best 2-3 year stretches for a reliever in the history of baseball.

 

[Vercingetorix]

He probably had one of the best 2-3 year stretches for a reliever in the history of baseball.

I absolutely agree with that. I still think the Braves wasted him in the bullpen for those years, though, pitching only 80 innings per year instead of 230+. Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Nolan Ryan -- any of them could have been outstanding closers at any point in their careers, but at significantly less value to their teams than being full-time starters.

The Braves spent much of the 90s proving that much of the conventional wisdom about having a "proven closer" is BS. You can get guys like Mike Stanton and Kerry Ligtenberg and Greg McMichael to do a reasonable job closing games one inning at a time even when you don't have a closer-type strikeout pitcher like Wohlers or Rocker available. Smoltz was predictably fantastic in the role, but the Braves were getting a lot less value out of him (and the $12m they were paying him) than they would have been getting had he been out there going 7 innings every five days. Once it was obvious that Smoltz's arm was going to hold up, IMHO, the Braves should have been trying to get him back into the rotation right then -- instead of him having to threaten to go elsewhere to get a chance to start again.

 

[Chief]

I think a lot of it was that they didn't necessarily have to put him back in the rotation to be successful. They still had guys like Russ Ortiz, a healthy Mike Hampton, Tom Glavine etc anchoring the rotation.

 

[Vercingetorix]

I didn't necessarily disagree with the decision from a purely winning-baseball-games standpoint, but that was about when the Braves started spending like a medium-market team instead of a big-market team. In that context, I just thought they were paying too high a percentage of their payroll for a role that was going to give them at most 80 innings, even if they were likely to be 80 really good innings. I had no problem with them paying Smoltz what they were paying him; I just thought they should put him back in the rotation instead of one of those other guys to free up some money to fill some of the team's other holes.