Atlanta Braves Podcast S3E2: all of your baseball hot buttons

The Hall of Fame?  HOF voting?  How about labor disputes?  While we await a resumption to the Atlanta Braves’ off-season activities, we’ve got some things to argue about.

It’s my fault, really… the podcast is out late this week thanks to COVID effects and such, but at least we can talk about our Hall of Fame arguments — including why Atlanta Braves great Andruw Jones should be voted in — just prior to the announcement coming up Tuesday afternoon.

FanSided held its own vote and released those results Monday morning… though without the participation of Jake or myself.  Maybe we should have voted, for those non-votes might have prevented Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens from getting a nod from the MLB editors of our sister sites in the FanSided network.

One thing that we are certainly united on here in this podcast:  if you cheated, you should never get the chance to join a fraternity encompassing the highest honors of your sport.

Do we think that Bonds and Clemens are the only such violators of the rules of fair play in baseball?  Hardly.  Do we know all of the cheaters?  Can we make such a determination?  Nope… doing so is virtually impossible.

But at the same time, would you excuse someone committing a murder because you can’t hope to round up all who are guilty of such a heinous crime?  No… you punish those who you can prove are guilty and then do what you can to bring others to justice.

It may be either an oversimplification or an exaggerated metaphor, but that’s our general take with regard to steroids, baseball, and the Hall of Fame.

In this podcast, we also discuss the state of affairs with the International Market that sees baseball sign mid-teens to professional contracts (not the best idea), more about the ongoing labor disputes, and even a little about Freddie Freeman.

So there’s some topics that should definitely get most Atlanta Braves fans going since we’ll be facing in the coming weeks… particularly as the MLB Lockout heads toward its third month in another week.

So here’s the deal… you can hear our thoughts in any of these ways:

• Download the podcast directly from this link to listen at your leisure
• Grab it from your favorite subscription service.  Almost all major servers already have it.
• Or… listen to it right here, right now.  Your choice.

I suppose we could have talked about robo-umps (excuse me… that’s the Automated Ball-Strike System) … a change that will invade some AAA ballparks this season.  That’s one hot button we omitted this week.

Another is Marcell Ozuna… but that topic is covered here.  The DH?  Regrettably, that seems like a forgone conclusion at this point.

Of course, some of these things assume we get the season going on time this Spring.  We should.  We hope.  But thanks for listening and then giving us your take on these things, too!