Sacrifices Work For Braves!

Hello again everyone! Sorry to have been absent the past couple of days, but work travel has been brutal lately. In fact, I’m writing this piece in a hotel room in Minneapolis, where, believe it or not, the weather is cold and rainy. I think I’m a bad weather magnet!

I wanted to just make a quick post to let everyone know, especially the Sabermetric community, that the bottom of the ninth inning tonight proves that sacrifices work. I’m not talking about the sacrifice bunt that Fredi had McLouth put down; all that did was take the bat out of Chipper’s hands. The sacrifice that worked was Fred Owens’ goat sacrifice; it allowed McCann to rip a line drive to deep right field, scoring Prado with the winning run!

Now that we know what type of sacrifices to use, all we have to do is figure out how to get more than 5-8 hits a game. If we don’t, we have to rely on the long ball to bail us out (like tonight, with the solo mammoth shot by Chipper and the clutch 3 run homer by Martin) when we get an “average” pitching performance. We’ll lose sub-par pitched games, and Fredi’s choices on the field will lose enough others that should have been won to keep our W-L record well below Pythagorean projections.

The question is: what can be done to jump start the hitting? I’d like to see if anyone out there has any ideas before I weigh in with a couple of ideas I have. Anyone?