Hey, it turns out you can also win baseball games!

The Braves and Nats played an old-school back-to-back doubleheader today, except for the fact that each game was only 7 innings. In the early game, Max Fried left after two innings pitched, but Acuna had himself a day and was all over the place. In the second game, the Braves survived a strong start by Strasbourg and themselves got 5 IP out of the “opener” Huscar Ynoa. The difference was a two run homer by Pablo Sandoval (two HR as a pinch hitter already!), and got the save from Sean Newcomb.

You know, just how they drew it up.

With these games starting at 9am Pacific, I missed most of the first game. The setup I have now is that I have the game on my TV (through MLB.tv on my Xbox One), so I usually just mute while I’m in meetings and talking to teammates. I’m finding myself looking forward to the games that start in the late afternoon, like they should.

0-4. It’s not a great spot. It was fun to watch most of this one, especially to see Acuña active throughout. But the offense dried up, and a bullpen that was impeccable last season was very vulnerable. One of these days we’re going to win one, right?

Well, I got paged again in the early morning, so I slept in to make up for it and missed the whole game. We’re now 0-3 for the first time since… 2019, when the Braves got swept to open the season by… the Philadelphia Phillies.

So this morning I got paged at 6am and was working the issue until 9am. Suffice it to say, I majorly slept in.

By the time I turned the TV on, the Braves were well on their way to being dominated by Zack Wheeler, and they didn’t put up much resistance after he came out. It was a moribund 4-0 loss.

Naturally, the off day yesterday that should have been boring wasn’t. As anyone who is reading this knows, MLB pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta for this season as a protest against the Georgia legislature’s latest attempts to keep anyone who isn’t a white Republican from voting.

There were ways to register your disappointment with MLB’s move without embarrassing yourself. Indeed, local politicians like Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock did just that. Unfortunately, the Braves themselves did not. Despite likely knowing about it before anyone else, the statement they issued had was more along the lines of a child throwing a tantrum than a reasoned response to the issue. It will be interesting to see if they follow they same “crackdown, then backdown” line that other major Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta did over the past week. I’m not holding my breath, though.

You can make a reasonable argument that the new law isn’t that bad. Most of these arguments say that things like not being able to distribute food or water to voters waiting in line are gratuitous but not actually that big of a deal. Perhaps in a vacuum, they are now. But let’s consider that the same Legislature that created those lines also passed this law, and then let’s consider that this is just the latest in a long line of attempts at disenfranchisement that has been going on for over a century. I think it’s completely reasonable to consider this context, and when you do, you’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt.

Going to try something a little different. Anyone who knows me knows that my favorite sports team on the planet is the Atlanta Braves, but I don’t write about them very often on the site. So this is just going to be a little column about what I was doing and my thoughts about the course of the game.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been base-ball.

I post that quote before the first game of every season on my social media feeds. I don’t know if the original script calls for baseball to be hyphened like that, but James Earl Jones says those two syllables like there’s a hyphen there, and who am I to argue with James Earl Jones?

Naturally, I’m still working from home and the first pitch of this game was around noon, Pacific Time. Generally a Braves game will start well into the afternoon for me, which I find pretty ideal as I try to get stuff done near the end of my day. It was also in the 70’s in San Francisco today, which is pretty rare even in the summer, much less on April 1. It was significantly colder in Philadelphia, with temperatures in the upper-40’s/low-50’s and a stiff 20 mile an hour wind. The players, just recently in Florida, looked as cold as the conditions.

I finally had a gap between meetings during which I could actually watch some of the middle innings, which was just in time to see Pablo Sandoval crush a changeup from Aaron Nola. That was no Citizens Bank cheapie – it was well into the second deck, and one of the hardest hit balls the Panda has had in years. (And due to the conditions, it had to be – almost every other fly ball was affected by the stiff wind.) Even better, it tied the game. The Braves eventually lost in the 10th, but that shot will be one of those we look back on the end-of-year reel in late September and go “man, he crushed that ball”.

The conditions were crummy, but not crummy enough to necessitate the backup opening day, so there’s no game until Saturday. I put together the schedule that you can see on the right last night, and boy howdy we have a lot of nationally televised games this season. That’s what coming within a game of the World Series will do for you.