Atlanta Braves Podcast 35: Freeman and the Rule-breakers

Seeing the Atlanta Braves land the most coveted award only underscores the off-season needs.

Great news!  Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman won the NL MVP trophy!  In addition, Braves took home four Silver Slugger awards.

The bad news?  What can this team do to repeat all of that success in 2020?

We’ve been starting to explore various aspects of the answer recently, and that happens at the end of this week’s podcast as well.  In the meantime, we provide our reactions to the happy event that was the announcement of Freeman’s recognition as the Most Valuable Player in this virus-shortened season.

There’s also a bit of discussion about whether this puts Freeman on the road to Cooperstown — spoiler answer “it didn’t hurt, but it’s still a tough climb from here”.

We also do our best to explain our respective levels of angst (they are pretty high) on the topic of MLB punishments doled out in recent years to John Coppolella, A.J. Hinch, and Alex Cora.  The short answer on this is… “nice guys get to have their jobs back”.  But this area got a lot of attention from all of us this week.

Finally, in the wake of seeing the Braves re-sign reliever Josh Tomlin, we try to figure out “why him?” in addition to what this might mean for both the bullpen and the Braves’ spending habits going forward.

Below you’ll find our embedded podcast player to hear all of this in detail for yourself as Jake, Fred, and yours truly go through these topics in detail.

Meanwhile, here’s a direct link to the episode, from which you can also download the audio to listen at your leisure.

Also on that page, there are convenient links available for you to subscribe to our podcast feed — whether via Apple, Google, or Spotify.

This topic at the end — the spending bit — is probably a sampling of the kind of things we’ll likely have to explore in detail through this off-season:  it’s definitely going to be a concern as we slog through this Winter.

Meanwhile — we’ll keep up with the news and events for our Atlanta Braves and continue using this podcast medium to (hopefully) explain our thoughts in better detail going forward: thanks for listening!