Atlanta Braves off-day chop All Star vote weekend Minor League review

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Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman _ seen here hitting homer in third inning against the Padres last week - leads all vite-getters in voting for the 2018 All Star Game. (Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images)

Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman _ seen here hitting homer in third inning against the Padres last week – leads all vote-getters in voting for the 2018 All Star Game. (Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images) /

The Atlanta Braves return home to an off-day after their less than successful west coast trip but All Star Voting has Braves sitting at or near the top of a lot of positions.

FINALLY! The rest of the country now knows Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman is something special. He leads all vote-getters by 150,000 votes over some guy named Harper.

Braves fans knew this all along but the casual fan who gets baseball news from sources with offices around the leagues biggest teams are just finding out.

Altogether the Braves have six players sitting at or close to the top of position lists. That hasn’t happened a long, long time.

All Star Braves

AS of five this afternoon eastern time. Freddie Freeman held a 395,000 vote over Paul Goldschmidt lead in balloting for NL first baseman.

Ozzie Albies led second base voting by about 30K votes over Javier ‘Strike out’ Baez
Dansby Swanson was in second about 240K votes behind Brandon Crawford
Nick Markakis holds the second outfield spot, 140K votes ahead of Matt Kemp
Ronald Acuna sits fifth about 30K behind Charlie Blackmon with Ender Inciarte checks in at sixth 50K behind Acuna
Johan Camargo is third, about 400K behind Nolan Arenado
Kurt Suzuki stands third in catcher voting about 50K behind Buster Posey

Atlanta Braves Kansas City blues

For many years the Atlanta Braves never had a problem on the road. They actually had a better record on the road than at home in a couple of seasons. Recently however, traveling past the Kansas river seems to guarantee a sub 500 trip.

Chip Caray suggested the Braves had to figure out what to do to change that in the future. The Braves can’t do much about it in any area other than fielding a better team but it is frustrating.

Some of the numbers go beyond stupid to horrendous. Since it’s Monday and I started with the good news, I’ll elaborate.

Numbers please

Using the Baseball-Reference head-to-head matchup tool and a little bit of math, the picture becomes clear. Traveling beyond the Kansas River is clearly bad luck and the Padres clearly have an incantation protecting Petco.

Since 2013 the Braves have a 29 – 64 record when playing the NL West out west. They were only 49 – 51 against those teams in Atlanta but that’s roughly 500, acceptable considering the teams the Braves fielded for a couple of those years.

	Away	Atlanta
Arizona	9-5	6-10
Colorado	8-14	9-7
Los Angeles	6-14	8-8
San Diego	3-15	13-5
San Francisco	6-11	8-12

The San Diego numbers are ridiculous.

Against the AL West the Braves are 6 –10 on the road. Not bad until you realize two of those road wins came against the awful 2014 Astros and three came against the Athletics in 2017. Playing the rest of the AL West out west, the Braves were 1-7.

Playing those teams in Atlanta the Braves managed a 7-9 record but three of those wins came against the Athletics who haven’t beaten the Braves since May 2008.

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