Clippings Friday, September 18, 2020 Braves.com

Cy Young poll: The 2020 favorites are ...

By David Adler

The two Award races this year are completely different, but both are coming into focus as the 2020 season gets down to the wire.

In the , has dominated since Opening Day. The race has been much more wide open, but a trio of front-runners has emerged in , Jacob deGrom and Trevor Bauer.

Who deserves to be named each league's best ? We put it up to the voters. MLB.com asked its reporters and analysts to fill out their 2020 NL and AL ballots, following our MVP poll last week.

There were 38 voters in total. Reporters were asked to rank their top five choices in each league, with five points awarded for a first-place vote, four for second, etc.

Here are the MLB.com picks for the AL and NL Cy Young Award winners.

AMERICAN LEAGUE

1) Shane Bieber, Indians (38 first-place votes, unanimous) It's no surprise that Bieber was the pick to win the AL Cy Young Award. Really, it's not even much of a surprise that he was the unanimous No. 1 choice. That's how good Bieber has been. The Indians ace isn't just the AL Cy Young favorite, he could get real AL MVP Award consideration.

Bieber is in position to win a pitching Triple Crown, as he leads the Major Leagues with eight wins and 112 and is second with a 1.74 ERA. He just became the fastest to reach 100 K's in a season in the modern era.

2) Lance Lynn, Rangers A bulldog on the mound for Texas, Lynn is second in the Majors in (71 1/3), and they've been good innings. The 33-year-old right- hander has a 2.40 ERA and 79 strikeouts in those 71 1/3 innings, ranking third in the AL ERA race and fourth in strikeouts. Lynn has pitched some of his best against the AL West-leading A's, going 2-0 with a 1.86 ERA and 25 strikeouts in his three starts against the Rangers' division rivals.

3) Lucas Giolito, White Sox Giolito has the defining pitching moment of the 2020 season: his brilliant 13- no-hitter against the Pirates on Aug. 25. But he's not the third-place AL Cy Young Award finisher in our poll for that achievement alone. Giolito is the ace for the playoff-bound White Sox team that's shot up to the top of the AL Central, with a 3.53 ERA, 86 strikeouts (third most in the AL) and 66 1/3 innings pitched (third most in the AL).

4) , Twins Maeda has been everything the Twins could have hoped for when they acquired him from the Dodgers in February. In his first season in Minnesota, the veteran Maeda ranks fourth in the AL with a 2.52 ERA and leads the league with a 0.758 WHIP. He's the best pitcher for a Minnesota team that's in playoff position and fighting for a second straight division title.

5) , Angels An under-the-radar offseason acquisition has paid major dividends for the Angels, who got a breakout starter in Bundy this year. Though some of our Cy Young Award ballots were cast before Bundy allowed a season-high five earned runs in his start on Wednesday, Bundy struck out a season- best 12 in the start right before that, and he still ranks seventh in the league in ERA (3.12), seventh in strikeouts (69) and sixth in K/9 (10.24).

Others receiving votes: Dallas Keuchel (White Sox), (Yankees), (A's), Hyun Jin Ryu (Blue Jays), Andrew Heaney (Angels), Brad Keller (Royals), Chris Bassitt (A's)

NATIONAL LEAGUE

1) Yu Darvish, Cubs (17 first-place votes) Darvish vs. deGrom vs. Bauer is a great NL Cy Young Award race, and the Cubs ace got the slightest of edges in our NL poll. Like Bieber in the AL, Darvish has a chance at a Triple Crown in the NL if he finishes the season strongly. He's tied for the league lead with seven wins, sits just behind Bauer in the ERA race at 1.86 and is right on the heels of , Bauer and deGrom for the league strikeout lead with 79.

2) Jacob deGrom, Mets (15 first-place votes) deGrom might well have been the frontrunner for the NL Cy Young Award going into his start Wednesday, but he was forced out early with hamstring spasms. Some votes in our poll came in before deGrom pitched, but the Mets ace is still one of the top few NL Cy Young Award candidates, ranking fifth in the NL in ERA (2.09) and third in strikeouts (80). DeGrom plans to see the 2020 season through to the end, and if he returns to "deGrominant" form in his final two starts, he could pull off a historic NL Cy Young Award three-peat that might even give him a chance at Cooperstown.

3) Trevor Bauer, Reds (5 first-place votes) Bauer is rising up to the top of the NL Cy Young Award conversation. He's the league leader in ERA (1.71) and ranks second in strikeouts (83), and he's also thrown a pair of seven-inning shutouts. Bauer's last two starts were both double-digit strikeout performances that lowered his ERA from over 2 to well under. He was dominant at the start of the season and he's dominating at the finish, and it just might be enough to push him over the top in the NL Cy Young Award race.

4) Max Fried, Braves (1 first-place vote) Fried has been on the injured list recovering from back spasms, but he's set to return Friday, and the fact that he's still fourth in our NL Cy Young Award poll tells you how great he's been on the mound this year. Fried is a perfect 6-0 with a 1.98 ERA in his nine starts, and he's allowed no home runs, making him the only pitcher who's thrown at least 50 innings and not allowed a single homer. The 26-year-old lefty stepped up to lead the first-place Braves rotation after went down with a season-ending Achilles tear, and Fried is returning just in time for the postseason.

5) , Padres Lamet is the ace the electric Padres needed as they rose up to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West this year. The right-hander was great down the stretch in 2019, with four double-digit strikeout games in the final two months, and he's only been better in 2020. Lamet is sixth in the NL with a 2.12 ERA, tied for fourth with Darvish and with 79 strikeouts, and he's racked up 11 K's in each of his last two starts, including an absolute gem to outduel and beat the Dodgers in his latest outing.

Others receiving votes: Corbin Burnes (Brewers), Aaron Nola (Phillies), Clayton Kershaw (Dodgers), Devin Williams (Brewers), Luis Castillo (Reds)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ten games to go until playoffs, and here’s where Braves stand

By Tim Tucker, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is the time of year when baseball players traditionally engage in “scoreboard watching,” sneaking peeks between pitches or innings at how teams near them in the standings are faring in games elsewhere.

Not this year, as most stadiums apparently have streamlined their in-game information displays because no fans are in attendance.

“They don’t have out-of-town scoreboards, so there’s no scoreboard to look at,” Braves Brian Snitker said. “I wish they did have them, but they don’t. Maybe that’s good. We’ll focus on what we’re trying to do and not worry about anybody else.”

The waning days of the regular season – the pennant stretch, to use the vernacular held over from baseball’s pre-divisions era -- just feel different this year. Maybe it’s because of the strangeness of the shortened season. Maybe it’s because the inflated number of teams that will reach the expanded playoffs has further diluted the significance of division titles. Maybe it’s because of the empty seats. Or because fans have so much else on their minds in 2020.

“It’s never felt normal from the get-go,” Snitker said of this season.

But with just 10 games remaining in the regular season, the Braves lead the by three games over the second-place , who will come to Atlanta next week.

Here’s where the Braves – and the postseason picture – stand heading into the final stretch of a season like no other:

REMAINING SCHEDULE

The Braves' final 10 regular-season games include a three-game series against the Mets in New York this weekend and a seven-game homestand next week (four against the surprising Marlins and three against the disappointing ). Max Fried, the Braves' No. 1 starting pitcher, will return from the 10-day injured list (muscle spasms in his back) to start Friday’s game in New York. His velocity fell off sharply in his last start before he went on the IL, so it bears watching if he’s back to peak form.

The Braves' series against the Marlins, starting Monday, looms potentially larger than anyone would have imagined when the season began with Miami projected to finish last in the division. It should be noted, though, that the standings might look different by Monday than they do today. Before the four-day visit to , the Marlins have a five-game weekend series, including doubleheaders Friday and Sunday, against the Washington Nationals, the defending World Series champs who are in last place in the NL East.

If the division remains unresolved after the Braves-Marlins series, the Braves have a more favorable schedule in the final weekend of the regular season Sept. 25-27. They’ll close with three games in Atlanta against the last-place team in the AL East (Boston) while the Marlins visit the .

The injury-ravaged currently are in third place in the NL East, four games behind the Braves entering the Phillies' game Thursday night against the Mets. The Phillies' remaining opponents are Toronto, Washington and Tampa Bay.

PLAYOFF FORMAT

Everything’s different this season, including the playoff format. Eight teams in each league, up from five, will make the playoffs. The first- and second-place teams in each division will qualify, and the two teams with the next best records in each league will make it as wild cards.

The teams will be seeded 1 through 8 in each league. The top three seeds will be the division champs in order of record. The next three seeds (4-6) will be the second-place teams in order of record. The final two seeds (7-8) will be the wild-card teams in order of record.

The format – No. 1 seed plays No. 8, No. 2 plays No. 7, etc. -- theoretically suggests that the higher a team’s seed, the weaker its first-round opponent. But that theory may prove invalid if a wild-card team has a better record than a second-place finisher or, as Snitker pointed out, if a lower-seeded team carries formidable starting pitching into a short series.

All playoff teams will begin with a best-of-three series, dubbed the “Wild Card Series,” played entirely in the home stadium of the higher seed. Then the best-of-five Division Series, best-of-seven League Championship Series and best-of-seven World Series will be played at neutral sites with the participating teams in “bubbles” to attempt to guard against COVID-19 infections.

LIKELY PLAYOFF MATCHUPS

The Braves currently are in position to be the No. 3 NL seed, well behind the NL West-leading and one game behind the NL Central-leading (before the Cubs' game Thursday night). As the No. 3 seed, the Braves would open the playoffs with a home series against the No. 6 seed, which likely will be the second-place team in the Central Division (Cincinnati, St. Louis or Milwaukee) or possibly the second- place team in the East.

Other scenarios:

⋅ If the Braves move up to the No. 2 seed, their first-round series would be at home against the No. 7 seed, which could be the Phillies (based on the standings entering play Thursday) or any of several other teams. Only three NL clubs – Pittsburgh, Arizona and Washington – were more than 2- 1/2 games out of a playoff spot through Wednesday’s games.

⋅ If the Braves were to finish in second place in the East, they likely would be the No. 5 seed and play an opening-round series on the road against the No. 4 seed, which likely will be San Diego (provided the Dodgers win the West).

STORYLINES DOWN THE STRETCH

1. Will the Braves' starting pitching rotation, decimated by injury and ineffectiveness this season, finally find some much-needed stability with Fried, Cole Hamels, and as the top four starters? Or will the failure to add a solid starter at the deadline loom large into the postseason?

2. Will the Braves' high-powered offense, which leads MLB with an .823 OPS, remain as formidable through the end of the regular season and into the playoffs?

3. Will Ronald Acuna, who has no hits and 12 strikeouts in his last 18 at-bats, break out of his slump soon? And (1-for-his-last-24), too?

4. Will , who leads the National League in batting average and RBIs and is second in OPS (through Wednesday), close strong in the MVP race?

5. Will the Braves’ deep bullpen stay fresh enough to keep doing what it has been doing all season (2.35 ERA from the sixth inning on)?

The other side: This Indians fan is a kindred spirit

By Kevin Riley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Editor’s note: This is the latest in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution series on the 25th anniversary of the Braves' World Series-winning season of 1995. In stories that will continue through October, we capture all the key moments and hear from the participants as they share their memories. Today’s installment takes a different approach as AJC editor Kevin Riley, a long-time Indians fan, shares his thoughts from the other side of the field.

When we made plans at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a year-long celebration of the Braves' championship, I knew it was a great idea.

Readers and fans would love it; players and coaches were still accessible and would be happy to reminisce about that historic and vindicating moment for Atlanta’s iconic team.

But for me, it would be painful, I believed. I’m a life-long fan of the team the Braves beat in the World Series – the . You know, the team that still hasn’t won a World Series since 1948.

As it turns out, the newspaper’s retrospection also awakened some great memories for me, and perhaps more important, showed me that the Braves fans I know aren’t so much rivals as kindred spirits.

More about that in a bit. First, let’s turn the clock back to a time even before that 1995 season.

***

Years before the ’95 Series, the Braves had already put the pieces in place for their historic run of winning division titles, and the Indians were stirring from a decades-long malaise. For much of my time as a fan, Cleveland’s baseball team stood firmly as one of the worst franchises in pro sports. On the occasion the Indians would develop a young star, fans marked the trade deadline on their calendar so they could prepare for the inevitable deal that sent a favorite player to the New York Yankees.

New owners took over. They invested in the farm system. The city had decided to build a new ballpark.

By 1993 a spark had been lit. That year I attended the final game in the old and decrepit Cleveland Municipal Stadium, capacity about 75,000. Even when the Indians were able to draw a crowd, it seemed empty. And they lost that day, an appropriate closing chapter as the team left some troubled history behind.

In 1994, I attended Opening Day at the new Jacobs Field. The Indians beat Seattle, 4-3, in 11 innings, and things sure seemed different.

One of my favorite memories of that frigid April day: when I visited the restroom, a guy held his hands under the water at a sink for a long time, smiling and looking around.

“Warm water,” he said. There was no such luxury at the old stadium.

And along with the warm water came a new kind of team. The Indians contended through that tantalizing season, competitive in the new Central Division of the American League.

With baseball’s new playoff format, they seemed assured of a place in the post season for the first time in 40 years – and the first time in my life.

Then the players' union decided to strike in August. canceled the rest of its season.

It felt like the baseball gods had decide to punish Indians fans for convincing ourselves that we belonged anywhere but baseball’s basement.

When the MLB and its players finally got back together and agreed to a 144-game season in 1995, I was sure something would go horribly wrong for the Indians.

But it didn’t. The Indians won nearly 70% of their games, going 100-44, winning the division by 30 games. But even that offered no comfort. The last time an Indians team had that successful of a season was 1954, when the team went 111-43. They were swept in the World Series.

I have two vivid memories from that time when the Indians officially clinched a spot in the postseason. I wore my Indians hat at the office the next day – did I mention they hadn’t been in the postseason for 40 years? (I worked in Dayton, Ohio, at the time, which is pure country. As you’ll recall, the Braves beat the Reds in the ’95 NLCS, dashing hopes of an all-Ohio World Series.)

I also remember how determined my father, a lifelong Clevelander, was to get all his six children to a postseason game. It seems a little strange now, but as fans we had no experience to tell us that 1995 wouldn’t be the only time in our lives the Indians would make the playoffs.

As it turned out, I attended a game in each of the three postseason series the Indians played that year, again with the thought this might be the only time I would get the chance to see them in the Division Series, the American League Championship Series and the World Series. It was a special night to attend a Division Series game with my older brother (Dad’s two eldest children got the first set of tickets), and to see how much my father, who is now dead, reveled in his kids going to the games. Just writing this gave me a reason to call and talk with my brother about it.

For the record, the Indians swept the Boston Red Sox in that series, and they beat the Seattle Mariners on their way to meeting the Braves.

I won’t run through the game-by-game of the World Series, but I am reminded of a few things:

· Five of the six games were decided by one run, which shows how close the ’95 World Series was.

· How about Braves' Javy Lopez picking off Manny Ramirez on first base in the eighth inning of Game 2? The Braves led by one, and slugger was at the plate. I still believe things may have come out very differently without that play. In my long-ago baseball-playing days I was a catcher, so over time I have come to admire Lopez for his talent and sagacity in that moment.

· The Indians had the best offense in baseball, lost the clinching Game 6 by a score of 1-0, and only had one hit. Then, it was painful and frustrating. Now, I can appreciate just how good that Braves pitching staff was.

My pain over the World Series loss to the Braves began to wane when I came to Atlanta in 2011.

Attending the 2014 baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony also softened my feeling toward that 1995 loss. , and were gracious – and deserving of the accolades they received that day.

My time in Atlanta has helped for me to develop an awareness of the frustrations of Atlanta pro sports fans. More about that in a bit.

My Indians loyalty requires me to pause here and talk about 1997 and 2016.

In 1997, the Indians returned to the World Series, and it looked like the curse would end. After all, they were playing the Florida Marlins, which were a Wild Card team and had only been around for five years.

The heavily favored Indians let the Series get to a Game 7, and then found a way to let the Marlins tie it in the ninth inning and win it in the 11th.

After that series, I ran into our baseball writer in the newsroom. He gave me a copy of the story he’d written that had the Indians winning. I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

In 2016, the Indians led the Chicago Cubs 3-1 in the World Series, but baseball’s lovable losers evened the series. In Game 7 in Cleveland, the Indians scored three runs with two outs to tie the game in the eighth inning. Then rain delayed the ninth inning. The Cubs won in 10 innings.

(Just between us, I am really sick of hearing Cubs fans tell me how much they deserved that World Series victory. I would prefer they remain “long- suffering.”)

I believe Braves fans and Indians fans can find plenty of common ground.

First, let’s join in our hatred of the Minnesota Twins – you because of ’91 and me because they remain in the Indians division and appear to be spoiling this season for me.

Also, let’s hold hands and forever loathe the Yankees.

And we can always revisit some recent heartbreak. No, wait. I know better than to even mention that 10-run first inning in the division series last year.

Braves fans and Indians fans are a lot alike. We know pain. We know disappointment. We know what it’s like to stick with our teams through unbearable losses. To clearly have the better team and still lose.

And deep down, we know it says important things about our loyalty and commitment that each April, we are back.

I admire Braves fans for those reasons. They can cling to 1995. Never let anyone cast aside your framed copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution front page from that day.

I respect that because I don’t have much hang on to, except a distant 1948, the last time an Indians team won the World Series.

Did I mention they beat the Braves, then of Boston?

The Athletic

Law: Expanded playoffs in 2021? Thanks, I hate it.

By Keith Law

The decision to expand the playoff field felt like every other change to the basic structure of baseball in this odd, pandemic-constricted season, where we would accept just about anything short of changing the number of outs in an inning as long as it meant we got actual baseball. Universal DH? Sure, I wanted that anyway! Runner on second base to start extra innings? Fine, it’s the price of baseball this year. Replacing select umpires with circus clowns to see if anyone notices? Now you’re wondering if I made that last part up!

The news on Wednesday that an expanded playoff format could continue into 2021 and beyond is decidedly unwelcome. The expanded playoffs were a solution to a specific problem: a truncated regular season deprived owners of a significant amount of broadcast revenue. A bigger field and more games add revenue for the postseason, which is shared across all teams and pays out at a higher rate per game because the telecasts are usually national. Even if we all wish to indulge in the fantasy that the 2021 season will return us to the halcyon days of (checks notes) 2019, with 162 games and fans in the seats, MLB will still see lower-than-usual revenues next year and that probably won’t bounce all the way back until 2022. Grabbing some extra cash now is probably just good business, and fans get a little bit more baseball in a year when they were getting less than half of a regular season.

Going forward, however, expanded playoffs would be primarily a money grab, and they risk diluting the regular season as a unique product while simultaneously reducing the value of individual games as broadcast properties in the playoffs. It also prioritizes short-term gain over the long-term financial health of the sport. Given that teams are shedding scouts — the lifeblood of the sport and the very folks asked to find future talent at deeply discounted prices — I suppose we could at least award MLB points for internal consistency.

Major League Baseball’s biggest differentiator from other major men’s North American sports leagues has long been its regular season, which takes up more of the calendar and stands alone on the stage for most of the summer. It also carries more weight than other leagues’ seasons because MLB has long allowed the lowest percentage of its teams into the postseason. The NHL has long gone the other direction: in 1980-81, the league had 21 teams, and 16 made the playoffs. Three of the clubs that missed the playoffs eventually relocated, including the original Colorado Rockies, who moved to New Jersey after just one more year in Denver.

The NHL and NBA both let just over half their teams into the playoffs; the NFL lets in 14 of 32, or 44 percent; in 2019, MLB let in one-third, and that format includes two teams that would exit the playoffs after a one-game wild card. The NHL and NBA use their regular seasons as an extended exercise in determining seeding – and that’s fine, neither better nor worse than the MLB format, just different. With the move to let in 16 of 30 teams, the same ratio as the NBA allows, or even 14 teams (with two division winners getting a bye in the first round) out of 30, MLB loses a prime differentiator between itself and its major competitors on the men’s sports landscape.

It also feels like a possible shadow move to discourage the best teams from spending at or above the luxury-tax threshold, because the reward for being the best team in the regular season is so much less than it was previously. Winning 100-plus games in the regular season meant a guaranteed playoff berth when those were somewhat scarce — no team has won 100 games and missed the playoffs in the wild-card era — but with 16 of 30 teams making the playoffs, 90 wins would almost certainly guarantee you a ticket into the postseason.

If 100 wins doesn’t do much for you but improve your seeding, what is the financial incentive to spend more to get to 100 when we know that the results of playoff series aren’t that far from 50/50, and making your team that much better on paper barely increases your odds of advancing? The answer is probably “very little,” and that would impact the free-agent market at all levels — even at the very top, as teams that typically run huge payrolls would no longer see the return on a $30 million investment in one player as they did under a system where fewer teams made the playoffs, and you could easily win 95 games and go home on Oct. 1.

MLB also had the advantage of a very compact postseason format that typically saw the entire slate played within one month (and often within the calendar month of October). That could change under a new format, with an extra round-plus of games, or MLB could stick to the format they’re using this year, which compresses the whole tournament by removing off days — a schedule that works against pitcher health and effectiveness and is something players typically oppose. The more we ask guys to pitch on short rest, the more they tend to get hurt. These innings are already high-leverage; asking premier relievers to throw more such innings on little to no rest seems like a recipe to blow guys out.

The potential plan isn’t all bad, and I don’t just mean that it will increase profits for billionaires. It disincentivizes tanking, because the bar to reach the playoffs is probably no longer even a .500 record. The model that multiple teams have used in the last decade — tearing down the entire roster, losing 100+ games for multiple seasons, restocking the system with high draft picks and the products of trades — hasn’t worked as well recently. Fans have generally accepted it, and even cheered teams doing it, because it did result in the Astros and the Cubs winning World Series titles, and watching a bad team in the majors with a burgeoning farm system and call-ups of exciting rookies was better than watching a team hovering in the 75- to 80-win range with neither hope of the playoffs nor the potential to land the next Casey Mize or MacKenzie Gore in the draft. Now, that team that’s projected to win 75 to 80 games is on the edge of playoff contention, and they’d have a much harder time selling their fans (or players, for that matter) on tanking. These teams probably won’t be in the market for the elite free agents, but they’re less likely to sell off talent, and that could in turn prop up salaries for some lower tiers of free agents because buyers would have fewer options available in trades.

Less tanking would mean more fans engaged with their favorite teams deeper into the season, although it might be somewhat offset by declining interest from fans of teams who coast through the last month or two because their playoff spots are secure. It also puts worse teams in the playoffs, a time when you expect to see the best of the best on the field, and increases the risk that we’ll see more blowouts against depleted or just inferior pitching staffs.

Baseball does need to expand its audience, and that will entail changes to the game on the field and to its structure off of it. I’m sure we’ll eventually see expansion, which brings a large one-time windfall to baseball owners, and which might help reflect demographic shifts, as the 30 MLB franchises we have now aren’t located in a way that maximizes the sport’s reach to the U.S. and Canadian populations. The universal DH is almost certainly here to stay, which absolutely will help the sport, removing the worst hitters in baseball from National League lineups. The automated strike zone is probably coming soon; I think the idea of eschewing available technology in favor of noticeable errors is confusing to anyone who didn’t grow up a fan of the sport (and to many of us who did).

Expanding the playoffs isn’t one of those easy wins. It will further line the coffers of MLB owners, though. Maybe they’ll use the extra cash to rehire all the scouts and coaches they’ve let go this year. (Narrator: They won’t.)

Atlanta Business Chronicle

Restaurants & Hospitality: Battery restaurants staying (relatively) busy despite empty Truist Park

By Chris Fuhrmeister

With the novel coronavirus pandemic forcing the Braves to play home games at an empty Truist Park, I assumed restaurants at the surrounding Battery Atlanta development would be hurting even more than the hospitality industry at large. Without legions of Braves fans flooding the development a few nights per week, it seemed reasonable to believe Battery restaurants were losing a vital chunk of their clientele amid the pandemic.

In actual fact, these businesses seem to be holding their own. In some cases, they are doing better than Intown counterparts. Linton Hopkins, the owner of C. Ellet's, told me his Battery steakhouse is recording better sales percentages than his two Ponce City Market establishments, H&F Burger and Hop's Chicken.

The patio at C. Ellet's has been open for dine-in since July, and Hopkins recently reopened the restaurant's dining room following a renovation that updated the floorpan for the new pandemic reality. (C. Ellet's now offers dining room seating only in the form of booths, which keep separate parties more socially distant.)

H&F Burger and Hop's Chicken at Ponce City Market are doing roughly 25-35% or normal year-over-year sales. C. Ellet's is at about 50%.

"I'm pleasantly surprised by how it's going up here," Hopkins said.

While the only fans welcome at Truist Park are those of the cardboard variety, flesh-and-blood Bravos supporters have been descending on the Battery to watch games at the development's bars and restaurants and the big screen that sits outside C. Ellet's. The masses aren't as teeming as those that would be attending Braves games in a typical season, but they are giving restaurants a boost.

“It’s not like an actual game day," Hopkins said, "but we are seeing growth in sales week over week."

In addition to the fake fans inside Truist Park, the Braves are furthering the illusion by piping in fake crowd noise. This all may add up to a strange environment inside the stadium, but intentionally or not, it is lending some sense of normalcy for those watching the game throughout the Battery.

"Families will be out on the main lawn in front of our patio, watching the game," Hopkins said. "What's interesting, because the sound is on in the stadium, you feel like the game is there. It really is an interesting feeling.

"It feels good. There's been a good mood up here."

A few more bites:

Chattahoochee Food Works, the food hall that is scheduled to open this fall at the Works development in Upper Westside, has a few new tenants on board. Pomodoro Bella will serve pizza, pasta and Italian market items. Baker Dude will be a cake-centric venture with both sweet and savory varieties. Baked Kitchen South African Street Food will feature South African-influenced burgers, sandwiches, skewers and sausages.

It took nearly a year, but Little Alley Steak Buckhead is back in business at One Alliance Center. The steakhouse closed last November after a kitchen fire, and just when it was about ready to reopen this past spring, the pandemic hit.

Pratt Pullman District's first big public event will be a chefs market that coincides with the penultimate night of the rescheduled and relocated Atlanta Film Festival. What is a chefs market? Think farmers market, but instead of buying ingredients, customers buy composed dishes from local culinary pros. Jamestown LP continues its revamp of the development formerly known as the Shops Buckhead Atlanta. Storico Vino will open at the project, now called Buckhead Village, this fall. The forthcoming wine bar comes from the team behind local pasta staples Storico Fresco and Forza Storico.

ESPN 10 things we've learned from MLB's shortened season

By Bradford Doolittle

One thing you can say for sure about the 2020 MLB season is that it is happening. Barring the kind of calamity that seems to wait around every corner this year, we're going to get to the playoffs. There seems to be a sound plan to get through that too. And if MLB can pull that off, we'll have a World Series and a champion.

If we get that far, it will qualify this season as a kind of triumph. We'll be sorting out the context of this campaign for years, but it will exist in the record books. Baseball's uninterrupted stretch of conducting some sort of major league campaign will still stretch back to the 1870s. Stuff has happened and some of it has been pretty good. Some has not.

As the first months of the pandemic dragged on, with the sports world in limbo, the wait for the baseball season was interminable. It often seemed like it wouldn't happen. It often seemed like it shouldn't happen, especially given the ill will generated by the negotiations between the league and the players for the parameters of the season. Then, suddenly, it began and the games piled up and it went by very fast. Just like that, summer is in its waning days and we're less than two weeks from the largest October bracket in history.

The season went by so quickly and has been so infused with omnipresent pandemic anxiety, that it might be easy to overlook just what this season has had to offer. And it has given us plenty, though some of its "gifts" weren't exactly on our holiday wish list. Maybe that should not qualify as a surprise. After all, the 2020 season is truly unlike any that's come before. When that happens, there have to be lessons we can learn, right?

Lesson No. 1: Depth matters, but it isn't everything

When the shortened season began with expanded 28-man rosters and talk about the importance of depth emerged, I wondered if the real key to surviving this season might prove to be getting your best players on the field and keeping them there as much as possible. If you accomplished that, you'd be in the postseason. As ever, the outcomes have proved far less black and white than that.

Certainly, some teams have benefited from leaning on the projected tops of their depth charts. Of the top five offenses by OPS+, three of them rank in the top 10 by plate appearances they've gotten from players projected before the season to be one of their nine best hitters. Those teams are the Mets (first in OPS+, first in PA from top-nine hitters), White Sox (third and seventh) and Dodgers (fifth and fifth).

But the story is complex. The Padres rank second in OPS+, getting some big years from core players but also out-of-nowhere contributions from new stalwarts such as Jake Cronenworth and . And the Yankees are fourth in OPS+ despite another season of injuries sapping the continuity of their everyday lineup. Then there is the sixth-ranked team in OPS+: That would be the Giants, and only three teams have gotten fewer plate appearances from hitters forecast to be among their top nine position players.

There is a similar dynamic on the pitching side. The Cubs (eighth in ERA+) and Athletics (sixth) are the top two teams in batters faced by projected to be among their top eight. But the Dodgers lead the majors in ERA+ despite having to shuffle starters all season, and the Indians rank second even though they traded their top projected starter (Mike Clevinger) and have featured an effective bullpen that looks much different from what it figured to be over the winter.

When you combine the two measures -- plate appearances from core players and batters faced by core pitchers -- here are the top five: (1) Cubs, (2) Athletics, (3) Phillies, (4) Angels, (5) Nationals. Two solid playoff teams, one only-in-2020 playoff team and two non-playoff teams.

The list of the bottom five teams by reliance on regulars is perhaps an indictment of both the depth and the lean-on-the-regulars models. Those clubs are: (26) Blue Jays, (27) Marlins, (28) Pirates, (29) Orioles, (30) Mariners.

If anything, that list tells you that perhaps the Cinderella-esque Marlins, Orioles and Mariners have benefited from not leaning on their players with the most solid projections. That list might actually suggest that, if you have a short season that is inherently full of randomness anyway, favoring players with high-variability forecasts over players with more stable, but less promising, outlooks is the way to go.

Lesson No. 2: There are lots of good players in

The Marlins' season should have been a wipeout. The low ranking in reliance-on-regulars we just noted wasn't necessarily the result of roster design philosophy but because of Miami's early-season COVID-19 outbreak that put the entire team on the shelf for more than a week. The Marlins' last game before that happened was on July 26 and they didn't resume play until Aug. 4. During the interim, GM Michael Hill and his staff scrambled to fill out Miami's player pool and active roster. So what happened? The Marlins won their first five games after being shut down. They have remained .500 or better at the end of every day this season except three, and have rallied to get back over break-even each time they've dipped below. With 11 days to go in the season, my latest simulations give the Fish a 78% shot at playing into October.

Certainly, the emergence of an exciting young pitching staff is the key part of the big picture in South Florida. But what about that intermediate stretch, when the Marlins fielded a club comprised of reserves who were backed up by other reserves, many of whom had not even been part of the team during either version of ?

There are simply more competent professional baseball players than ever before. Stars are still precious and prospects who might become stars are almost as important. But the class between is larger than ever. If it wasn't, the Marlins should have devolved into a laughingstock, at least for a period of a couple of weeks. That they did not speaks well of the general level of play in professional baseball, circa 2020. (Keeping in mind that level of play is a different thing than style of play.) It also speaks well of the Manager of the Year case for .

Lesson No. 3: Too many playoff teams is a bad thing

This is not a new lesson, but it's one that has suddenly become a hot topic again. I have stated my case against the over-expansion of playoff teams many times already, and my reasoning is summed up here. That diatribe was in response to the proposal for a 14-team playoff structure, and that's what I'm addressing again here. My assumption is that the 16-team format in place for this season is too laden with self-evident problems to ever be considered a permanent part of baseball. Topping that list is the fact that it makes finishing in first place all but meaningless, but the list is long.

I won't repeat myself entirely, but I just want to double and triple down on a couple of points. This morning, when scanning the overnight headlines, I saw one from the : "Angels' path to playoffs grows darker with loss to Diamondbacks."

This isn't a criticism of the headline. It was appropriate, which is the problem. Think about this: With their loss to Arizona on Wednesday, the Angels fell to 20-30 on the season. The math is easy: That's a .400 winning percentage. That is a rate of winning that translates to a 65-97 record over a 162-game season. Yet with less than two weeks to go, the Angels started the day just four games out of a postseason slot. Thus a .400 team had every reason to be thinking about the playoffs even though it had just 11 games remaining.

Now, proponents of an expanded playoff format might see this as a good thing. It's not. (The 2020 season excepted, of course.) This is not exciting. It is not interesting. A "race" of this sort is not going to bring a net-positive number of new fans to the product, because insofar as drama exists in a competition between sub-mediocre teams, it is contrived and without integrity. The alienation of existing fans would outweigh the draw for new fans.

The problem is that the attention shifts away from the top of the standings to the middle, for fans, media and team decision-makers alike. The Dodgers and White Sox have already clinched playoff spots. In a 16-team format, there would be seasons in which a top team mathematically clinches a postseason spot not long after Labor Day. When the bar for entry is too low, the certainty of postseason action for the best teams is too high. The negative consequences of that cannot be overstated. The bar is set not at excellence, but at mediocrity.

Also, stop comparing baseball's postseason to that of other sports. The notion that because you have X percent of teams getting into the playoffs in one sport, then baseball should follow suit is, to put it kindly, a head-scratcher. The dynamics of baseball are different from those of other sports, the most important aspect being that the disparity between teams needs lots and lots of games to be sorted out. Baseball is baseball. Let the other sports do their thing, but it should have nothing to do with how baseball sets up its structures.

Finally, we can all agree that baseball needs to make itself as attractive as possible to future generations. What we can't agree on is how that will happen. Any suggestion that we actually know how future generations, or the current ones still in their youth, will spend their leisure time in the decades to come is, at best, questionable. To say that we will attract them by letting everyone into the postseason seems to me to be insulting to the young fans we're trying to attract.

The bottom line is that baseball should always strive to be the best version of itself. But if it strives to reinvent itself into something else, then it's not baseball anymore. It's something else.

Lesson No. 4: Amazing things are always happening in baseball

The best argument for pushing through with this season is probably in this concept. In the grand scheme, sports are not essential by any metric. And the need to conduct the season was far outweighed by public and personal health considerations. However, because baseball has done a pretty good job of pulling this off without making it seem like the roof was about to cave in at any moment, there has been much enjoyment to be gained from even this bizarre, 60-game campaign. Enjoyment isn't everything, but in a year like this one, it's not nothing, either.

Clayton Kershaw became the Dodgers' career leader in strikeouts and bWAR, cementing his status as one of the best players ever for one of baseball's marquee franchises. finally reached the magic number of 660, the career total of Willie Mays. He moved into third place on the RBI list, surpassed only by and Babe Ruth. Lucas Giolito and Alec Mills have thrown no-hitters. has continued (slowly) his march to 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.

The Braves scored 29 runs in a game, setting an NL record. In doing so, they had three players each drive in five runs or more in the same game. According to Elias, that's just the ninth time that has happened. Also, the 20 combined RBIs for Adam Duvall, Freddie Freeman and Ronald Acuna Jr. tied the MLB mark for a trio of teammates in one game. It also happened on April 30, 1944, when the Giants' Phil Weintrub (11) and Ernie Lombardi (7) were joined by a pair of teammates who each drove in two. More famously, when the Red Sox routed the St. Louis Browns 29-4 on June 8, 1950, Bobby Doerr (8), Walt Dropo (7) and Ted Williams (5) combined to drive in 20 runs.

Fernando Tatis Jr. jumped to the top of the conversation about who the game's best player is and became baseball's breakout star. Unless you think that new star is White Sox rookie Luis Robert. Either way, both the ChiSox and Padres have become must-watch teams that figure to burn brightly on the national stage in the years to come.

This is far from a full accounting of memorable things from this season, and we've got 10 more days and a month of playoffs to go. None of this would have happened had the season been lost. Of course, a full season would have been better, and the short season would not have been essential if it proved to be too dangerous, but what we ended up with reminds us of just how much we get from every single campaign.

Lesson No. 5: The immeasurable value of rabbit holes

As you probably anticipated, we're not talking about literal rabbit holes, but the metaphorical kind that are so common in the digital age, where you set about looking up one thing and then click your way in a direction that you never would have anticipated. Sure, it can be a waste of time, but it can also lead to some fun discoveries. It's the kind of small pleasure you get from a baseball season, each of which is just the newest chapter of the longest sports book ever written.

Every day in a baseball season presents opportunities for these excursions. Here is one rabbit hole very much in that esoteric vein:

A few days ago, Orioles rookie Ryan Mountcastle and White Sox rookie Nick Madrigal were both hitting in the high-.360s, low-.370s range. Neither had even enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, so a few empty games since then have dropped them down to more normal- looking averages. Still, for a flash, the career averages of those two debutants ranked second and third in baseball history, if you set the plate appearance minimum at just 80.

It's a silly thing to do, to look at it that way, but I enjoy doing it because the leaderboard is less strange than you would think, making the weird names on it stand out. The thing is, it's always a current rookie atop it because if you've hit that well, you'll stay in the lineup until you find your eventual level. So even with such a low bar for playing time, and Mountcastle and Madrigal off to such hot starts, Ty Cobb's record .366 career mark still ranked fourth. Still, for a couple of days, Mountcastle and Madrigal stood above Cobb.

But none of them -- Cobb, Mountcastle or Madrigal -- stood above Terry Forster. Forster hit .397 in his career over 86 plate appearances from 1971 to 1986, topping the 80 PA-minimum career batting average leaderboard. While I remember Terry Forster as a player from the last part of his career, this is something I did not know and could not have possibly suspected.

For those not old enough or historically curious enough to recall Forster, he was a premier lefty reliever who saved 127 games over his career and eventually became a one-out lefty in his later days. For a time, his notoriety expanded well beyond a sports context. This happened in 1983, when late-night legend David Letterman called Forster a "fat tub of goo." (Here's the full transcript from Sports Illustrated.)

"[Forster is] the fattest man in all of professional sports. I mean the guy is a balloon. He must weigh 300 pounds. The guys doing the ballgame, Skip Caray and Ernie Johnson, not once do they mention that this guy is enormous. They pretend the guy couldn't be in better shape. He is a L-O-A-D. Not once, when they see this mammoth figure, this silo, get up in the bullpen ... I just want them to say, 'Terry Forster's warming up, he's a left- hander, an ERA of 3.5 ... what a fat tub of goo.' Nobody says a thing. It ruined my weekend."

Forster responded by saying, "My wife says worse things than that." He then made a music video about it (proceed with caution). Finally, he ended up going on Letterman's show and making tacos.

All of this from the best hitter of all time. And without hot starts by pair of 2020 rookies, I would never have followed the rabbit to find this out.

Lesson No. 6: Statcast data is changed

This season, baseball went to a new, optical-based tracking system called Hawk-Eye to gather the fine-grained performance data that has revolutionized the game in recent years. I am far from having any sort of sense of just what effect this has had. In fact, it was only last week that I found the first thing that caused me to raise a brow.

In response to a conversation about whether there have been more egregious errors this season, as the questioner observed anecdotally, I went looking at Statcast to see if there was anything revealing. I didn't find anything that directly addressed the issue. Instead I found this:

Expected batting average, plays resulting in fielding errors 2016: .226 2017: .221 2018: .219 2019: .223 2020: .254 Source: baseballsavant.mlb.com What this suggests is that the bar for scoring a play as an error has been lowered by quite a bit. In other words, if a ball with a .223 batting average expectation is misplayed, that's going to stand out as an error, right? But one with .254 is murky. That's a fairly well-struck ball. So what happens to all the balls between .223 and .254; what is going on there? The assumption, before checking, would be that lots of balls falling into that range are now being scored as errors, whereas before they were not.

Scanning a list of individual errors shows a number of balls with expected averages in the high-.300s that have resulted in errors. That seems wrong. If you hit a ball that well, it's probably a hit -- in theory. And, perhaps, because scorekeepers are doing games remotely this season, something is happening where fielders aren't getting the same benefit of the doubt as in years past.

Alas, league error data does not bear that theory out. The overall rate of errors per game (0.56) matches 2013 for the lowest in baseball history, and the overall fielding percentage (.984) is exactly the same as it's been since 2014.

After bouncing this issue around internally at ESPN, and with folks who work more closely with Statcast data than I do, these numbers remain a bit of a mystery. It's certainly possible there is something going on with scorekeepers. However, one telling bit of data beneath of all this, shared by a Statcast guru, might be revealing: The error rate on fly balls is down this season, but on ground balls, it's up significantly.

One possible reason for this is not the scorekeepers or any change in the quality of fielding, but the switchover in tracking equipment. The old system was effective at tracking pitches and balls in the air, but sometimes struggled with picking up certain kinds of grounders. According to my Statcast guru, the data coverage on ground-ball data has improved from something like 89% to 99% with the change of systems.

It's certainly possible that the sort of grounders that were being missed previously account for the strange year-over-year disparity in fielding error results. If so, that's a good thing: It means the new tracking system is providing us with an even richer tapestry of data than the old one, and it will add integrity to the attempts to calibrate effective infield fielding metrics. We'll know more after we've lived with Hawk-Eye for a few seasons. For now, we can only guess that it's seeing more of the game than has ever been seen before.

Lesson No. 7: Tim Anderson can really hit

I love watching Tim Anderson play baseball even though he has the exact kind of offensive approach that used to drive me crazy. (Though, by now, assertive hitters have gained a soft spot in my heart, as take-and-rake thumpers have proliferated to a startling degree.) As of Thursday, Anderson had walked in 5.4% of his plate appearances, a career high. That ranked 57th of 61 qualifying AL batters this season. Yet, one season after winning the AL batting title, Anderson was hitting .373.

For one thing, that sets up a heck of race for the AL batting title. New York's D.J. LeMahieu also was hitting .373 and both hitters should qualify, barring a significant injury. Since Sept. 1, Anderson is hitting .450. The last time a player hit over .370 without winning his league's batting crown was 1936, when Earl Averill (.378) finished behind Luke Appling (.388).

Last season, Anderson walked just 15 times, the fewest for a batting champ during the modern era. He beat the mark of 16, set by Zack Wheat in 1918. While Anderson is walking at a higher rate in 2020, the shortened season means he probably would break his own record if he holds off LeMahieu for the batting title. Anderson had walked just nine times through Wednesday.

All of this begs the question: How does he do it? Everyone reasonably expected a regression from Anderson this season, largely because of his hyper-aggression and because he put up an otherworldly .399 average on balls in play in 2019. Through Wednesday, his 2020 BABIP stood at .435. That's 18 points higher than that of any other qualifying hitter in baseball.

In fact, according to baseball-reference.com, Anderson's BABIP would put him in truly rarefied air:

Highest single-season BABIP, modern era (at least 150 plate appearances) 1. Ty Cobb (.443, 1911) 2. Tim Anderson (.435, 2020) 3. Shoeless Joe Jackson (.433, 1911) 4. Ty Cobb (.424, 1912) 5. Babe Ruth (.423, 1923) Source: baseball-reference.com

Lesson No. 8: Don't throw a southpaw on the South Side

Yes, it's another White Sox-related item. If you have not noticed, the 2020 ChiSox destroy left-handed pitching. Through Wednesday, Chicago was hitting .293/.371/.551 against lefties for a .922 OPS. That leaves us with this still-in-progress all-time leaderboard:

Highest single-season team OPS, vs. left-handed pitching 1. White Sox (.922, 2020) 2. Rangers (.885, 1998) 3. Yankees (.884, 1998) 4. Tigers (.873, 2020) 5. Yankees (.872, 1994) 5. Twins (.872, 2019) Source: TruMedia

Now, the 2020 Tigers are on the list so we have to again remind you that this is based on a season that is nearly over even though most clubs have fewer than 50 games on their ledger. Still, if you consider the same leaderboard, based on just 50-game starts to a season, the White Sox still rank 10th all-time. They are mashing lefties to a historic degree.

Which leads to the next question: Which possible playoff opponents rely the most on lefty pitching? Ranking probable AL playoff teams in order according to batters faced by lefty pitchers: (1) Rays, (2) Athletics, (3) Yankees, (4) Blue Jays, (5) Twins, (6) Astros, (7) Indians.

Lesson No. 9: Blowouts are more common, but it's not just this season

Yes, we've noticed how many extreme blowouts there seem to have been this season. Colleague Dave Schoenfield noted this a couple of days ago, quoting Elias data that shows the number of routs thus far is historically high for the first 50 games of a season.

Let's look at just games decided by 10 or more runs, making that our definition of a blowout. When the Yankees beat the Blue Jays 13-2 Wednesday, it was the 33rd such game this season. That's a rate of one every 22.27 games. Last season, it happened even more often, if just barely: The rate was one every 22.08 games.

Three of the highest-ever rates of blowout games have occurred since 2017. In 2010, it was one in 28.93; in 2000 it was one in 22.08; in 1990, it was one in 33.41. This is not a linear trend through baseball history and it seems highly correlated with league run-scoring levels.

Perhaps leveraged pitching has something to do with this. According to TruMedia, during the division era (since 1969), the overall FIP for a relief pitcher in a low-leverage situation has been 4.26. The first half of the 2010s saw most of the best single-season figures for this category, with 2014 topping the list with 3.65.

At the other end of the spectrum, three of the five highest low-leverage, reliever FIPs have been posted over the past four seasons. It's 4.58 this season, slightly better than 4.63 in 2019. The worst figure was 4.78 in 1999.

This is just a speculative theory, but there could be a couple of things working in tandem. First, with managers more attuned to the concept of leverage than ever before, they aren't squandering their A-level relievers in blowout games. Certainly, we've noted in recent years how much more often position players seem to have taken the mound.

But this could also be a manifestation of baseball's supply problem when it comes to relief pitchers. Teams are using so many pitchers -- a record 4.47 of them per game this season -- that they are simply dipping past the bottom of the competence pool. Whatever is going on, it's more common than ever for a resounding defeat to devolve into an embarrassing rout.

Lesson No. 10: Small ball is ailing, but it still has its good days

When pitchers' hitting is removed from the equation, this season's aggregate .246 batting average is battling 1968 (.245) and 1908 (.246) for the lowest in history. Without pitchers stepping up to the plate, teams are averaging .07 sacrifices per game, less than half of last season's all-time low. And we've never had a lower rate of caught stealings (24.7%) as teams have become increasingly risk averse on the basepaths.

All of this has happened during the first season that baseball has used the free baserunner in extra innings. The ploy, a gimmicky one at that, has helped shorten extra-inning games during a season that does not need extra-long games. More importantly, the general popularity of the rule has reminded us how much baseball fans appreciate a diversity of strategy, not simply one built around strikeouts and home runs.

Perhaps that's why one of the most exciting plays of the season happened earlier this week, and it was a small-ball play. In a tight, terse pitching duel at Guaranteed Rate Field on Monday, the White Sox and Twins were tied 1-1 in the bottom of the eighth. Chicago got its first two batters on base to start the frame, bringing Adam Engel to the plate. For most of baseball history, this has been a no-brainer sacrifice situation. Not so anymore.

However, Engel has been a light hitter through his career, so Twins manager brought his corner infielders in. When lefty Taylor Rogers went into his windup, Engel squared up. Twins Jorge Polanco broke toward third base and the corner infielders started to charge. Then Engel pulled the bat back and slapped a grounder right through the vacated shortstop position.

That gave the White Sox the lead and they went on to win the opener of their biggest series in several years. Chicago ranks fourth in the majors in runs and fifth in homers. But Engel's slap hit was as good as it gets. That is baseball in its full diversity of style, a lesson that in any season, no matter how strange, the lords of the game would do well to keep close at heart.