Talking Chop

I guess it happens every time any team makes a lot of moves in one week, but the last couple of days it seems like every reporter has had his or her take on the Braves and their flurry of moves. To recap, in just the past seven days the Braves lost pitching-icon John Smoltz to Boston, signed Japanese starter Kenshin Kawakami, re-signed Omar Infante to a two-year deal, agreed in principle with free agent starting pitcher Derek Lowe, and saw the Los Angeles Dodgers release former Atlanta golden boy Andruw Jones (who everyone now thinks we're gonig to sign, including, aparently, Andruw himself).

The first article that caught my ire is from Dayn Perry at Fox. He's such a "good" journalist that he doesn't even know we already had Infante:

New to Atlanta will be Derek Lowe, Kenshin Kawakami, Javier Vazquez, Boone Logan, David Ross, and Omar Infante. For his efforts, GM Frank Wren has revamped the rotation, added infield depth, and put another lefty arm in the bullpen mix.

That pretty much leads me think he doesn't know what he's talking about (which he doesn't), and illegitamizes the rest of the article (which says nothing new).

The second article that caught my ire was from Buster Olney and got passed around yesterday. There are so many things just completely intolerable about this article it's taken me 24 hours to come to a simmer.

• Olney seems to think that the Braves should have traded for Jake Peavy no matter what the cost would have been. To hell with our future.
  
• He actually think that a sticking point in the Peavy trade was the no-trade clause. As if the two sides got that far.
  
• He has an unnatural love of Orlando Cabrera.
• Olney reads so much into what people think happened behind the scenes of the Peavy trade that he winds up in fantasy land trying to equate selling A-ball prospect Jeff Locke on the open market for cash with the signing of 12-year veteran Derek Lowe.
• He actually believes that Oliver Perez at $30 million for three years or Jon Garland on a one-year deal would have been better options than Lowe.

All Buster did was start that article out with a desire to bash the Braves, then tried to create a bunch of paper-thin arguments to support his original point. This was some particularly messy journalism from someone who is usually pretty solid (and I'm not just saying this because he's speaking out against the Braves).

The Sporting News has a better article than most, but the guy still tries to pound some nebulous theme into the ground.

I know these guys are writing for the general baseball and sports audience, who are likely to be a lot dumber than the fan who actually keeps up with baseball, but I alaways thought that it was the job of journalism to raise the level of discourse, not to bring it down to a sub-moronic level.

I've been very antagonistic lately... dunno why.

The Mississippi Braves had their website redesigned.