The Atlanta Braves have the NL East well in hand, but their bargain-bin August supplements have them ready to go at a moment’s notice.
No more trading past July? Not a problem for the Atlanta Braves. After this year’s single trade deadline passed, the leaders of the NL East laughed in the face of this new league order and forged ahead to build a new bench mob anyway.
Adeiny Hechavarria was cut by a team trailing Atlanta in the East by 10 games, Billy Hamilton faced reduced playing time in Kansas City, and Francisco Cervelli was left for dead by some overzealous reporting in Pittsburgh. Now they all play for the playoff-bound Atlanta Braves.
A moratorium on August trades turned this period of roster building into something more like buyout season in the NBA. Buyouts annually deliver a lot more smoke than fire, but that doesn’t stop The Ringer’s Bill Simmons from an annual recollection of the ‘08 Celtics for an example of buyout impact. Sam Cassell? P.J. Brown? Instant bench! Hello, championship!
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While those veterans did a standout job soaking up minutes down the stretch for those Celtics – oh, 11 years ago (!) – relying on hand-to-hand street buys for reliable bench contributors won’t usually yield the key contributors your championship contenders needs.
But it just might.
Over the course of eight days from August 16 to 24, the Braves added not one, but three position players who may play key roles off their bench as they look to stave off the hard-charging Nationals. Hechavarria and Hamilton already showed off their two-man game in delivering the game-winning run in extras against Hechavarria’s former employer on Friday.
Not to be outdone, Cervelli followed up with a 3-5, 3-RBI game on Saturday. He knocked in Hechavarria as part of a two-run double to kick off the scoring in a 9-5 Braves win, while adding an insurance run with another RBI double in the 9th.
It’s not that these particular contributions mean so much – though helping your new club put the rival Mets 12 games back with a 3-game weekend sweep certainly helps. The real impact of these moves will come further down the line.
Baseball season is indeed a marathon, and with a month plus left on the docket, the possibility of catastrophic injury or inexplicable talent atrophy remains very much on the table. These things happen in baseball, and when the cataclysm hits, the bench is the go-bag that keeps a well-prepared team from entering the playoffs empty-handed.
The 25th man on the 2016 Indians playoff roster wasn’t a roster decision that talking-heads probably spent a lot of time on, but when Game 7 went into extras, and Cleveland’s 25th man came to the plate, there were no strategic decisions left. There was only standing by as Michael Martinez stepped to the plate for the most important at-bat of the season.
No shade to Martinez – who had been a relatively consistent producer in Triple-A – but he was not the guy the Indians wanted at the plate in that instant. Martinez was a 33-year-old journeyman with a career batting line of .197/.241/.266 across just 578 big-league plate appearances for the Phillies, Pirates, and Indians. Whatever their reasons for carrying him on that roster, it was not to take the defining at-bat in the defining moment of the World Series.
Hechavarria, Hamilton, and Cervelli are pros who won’t be cowed by the moment. They’re veterans more in the ilk of Rajai Davis – and we know what he was capable of that October.
Hamilton’s skill set as one of the fastest players in the game is tailor-made for October. Hechavarria can handle shortstop until Dansby Swanson is healthy enough to return. Cervelli came up under the bright lights of Yankee Stadium, and he’s since become a starting quality backstop in Pittsburgh.
You’re not likely to find a lot of fans at SunTrust Park wearing their jerseys, and if they had started up-the-middle for Atlanta since April, there’s a decent chance these Atlanta Braves wouldn’t be in the pole position they are today. But when October comes and the weight of the season comes to rest on a single series, game, at-bat – this trio will be ready to go.