FanHouse BobbyCox

June was quite a month. On the field, Randy Johnson earned his 300th win, and the Rockies caught fire after promoting Jim Tracy to manager. Off the field, Donald Fehr stepped down as executive director of the Player's Association, the Nationals drafted super-prospect Stephen Strasburg, and it was learned that everyone in the entire universe has been using steroids.

The Dugout personas of Charlie Manuel and Bobby Cox break it all down in this evening's Dugout, after the jump.

ATLANTA -- This isn't quite baseball's Hula Hoop, but it is close. In other words, the suddenly loud and colorful explosion throughout the universe for anything involving the Boston Red Sox is a fad.

It's just lasting longer than usual. So Red Sox fans should enjoy all of this before it is going, going, almost gone, because it is fleeting.

Here's the latest: The dominant color of the Atlanta Braves is blue, so you would expect their fans to dress accordingly. That said, when you studied the packed stands during each of the Braves' past three games inside of what had been a fairly barren Turner Field this season, there was nothing but red.

Red Sox red.

Jeff Bennett is notable for two reasons. First off, he's the unfortunate subject of the most unflattering photograph ever taken (see image right). Second, on Wednesday, he sucker-punched a dugout wall, broke his left fifth metacarpal, and returned to the mound to pitch another full inning.

The fracture didn't seem to adversely affect Bennett's performance. Which begs the question: how many times have you thought, "wow, I sure am glad I have a fifth metacarpal behind the pinky finger of my non-dominant hand! What a wonderful skeletal feature!" I never have. What a worthless bone.

Friday's Dugout is after the jump.

MLB Power Rankings: Where MLB FanHouse's editors, writers and bloggers team up to break down the who's who and the what's what in the baseball world.

While it's entirely possible the Blue Jays do hit a snag, isn't it about time columnists across the internet stopped doing Can the Blue Jays Really Keep This Up? pieces by now? I've seen at least 10 in the past three weeks. There are almost as many The Rangers Are For Real posts. The discrepancy in the media's faith in those two is likely due to the divisions in which the teams reside, but seven weeks isn't a small sample. At some point, you have to start giving credit where it's due.

To recap: when The Dugout set forth to preview every team in baseball, we skipped over the Phillies and Braves. Some of you were disappointed, and I attempted to get cute by previewing the Montreal Expos in response. That's when one of our esteemed commenters got mad [sic]:

you do a dougout on the damn Expos? Where is the Braves 2009 preview? How about the damn world champion Phillies?

you suck

I would like to profusely apologize, and I hope to make it up to you by presenting a sober, informed look at both the Phillies and Braves. You can read it after the jump.

Starting Five is our wrapup of the previous day's baseball action, with a quick nod to what is ahead.

You Oughta Know ...
That Braves manager Bobby Cox did not get ejected at any point during the seventh-inning fiasco his pitchers created on Wednesday. If ever there were a time that the all-time leader in early managerial exits would want to get the boot, this was it. The Braves blew a 10-3 lead to the Phillies in the seventh inning, on the way to a 12-11 loss. Worse, three of the eight runs the Phillies scored came on consecutive bases-loaded walks. Blaine Boyer was responsible for two of them.

"It's the worst inning I've seen," said Boyer. "Talk about your ultimate. I mean, we were [rolling] there for a while, 10-3, and it just blows up like that. I take the brunt of the blame for that one."

With the major league season kicking off in roughly a month, it's not very promising to see one of your team's star players fall injured. So when news broke that Chipper Jones left the United States' World Baseball Classic team due to an oblique injury, Braves fans were likely a bit worried.

According to several parties close to the situation, though, worry not.

This is interesting (and completely random), but Hank Aaron is upset that Bobby Cox likes to take all the credit for drafting Chipper Jones with the first overall pick in 1990. How upset? So much so that he apparently called Terence Moore of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution out the blue to set the record straight:

"I was listening to something [last week] on television where Bobby was talking about how, when Chipper came to the team, he took him aside to tell him what we did to get him here, and I was stunned, really," said Aaron, before recalling a conversation he had with Braves officials in 1990 when they owned the No. 1 pick before that June draft. By the time of the draft, Aaron had been promoted to senior vice president.

Said Aaron, with a sigh, "I told Bobby. I told them all, and I told them, 'Y'all better go and get Chipper Jones.' "

At the time, Cox served as GM in addition to manager, and Aaron served as farm director before being promoted to senior vice president. As Aaron tells it, Cox was dead set on taking Todd Van Poppel until Aaron spoke with Van Poppel's father and discovered he'd be difficult to sign.

Fan are stupid, at least in terms of the mob mentality of finding blame. It's very easy when things are going wrong to look for someone to blame. Generally, that person is, in some sort of order: 1) the superstar player, 2) the coach or 3) the general manager.

It's apparently Braves fans' turn to point fingers at Bobby Cox, which, to me, is absolutely ludicrous. But it's happening.

A significant segment of them believe manager Bobby Cox should be held accountable for the team's recent failings, that the venerable Braves skipper should be replaced. But they would be hard-pressed to find that opinion shared by any of those who play for him or compete against him.

Yeah, ridiculous, right? And I'm not the only one. Chipper Jones feels the same way.

"He's not any different than he's ever been," Chipper Jones said of Cox, 67. "He's just not dealing with the same deck of cards that we had coming out of spring training.

"Other teams have had injuries, but not to the extent that we have. You give Bobby Cox the same deck of cards that we had coming out of spring training for a full 162 games, I guarantee you the standings look a lot different."

First of all, Chipper is dead on. The Braves have been injured and unfortunate this year, and nothing more. Secondly, most teams would kill to have Bobby running their ship (or having steered it to 14 consecutive division titles). And finally, this is a "JoePa Situation" in my mind.

Bobby Cox gets to coach in Atlanta as long as he wants to. He won a World Series and he owned the 1990's. He gets that right. And he'll know when the time is right to step down. Not us.

When I checked the Braves record and realized that they were an insane 4-21 in games decided by one run, I was pretty shocked. But after the super-smart people at Baseball-Reference pointed me in the direction of just how historically bad it was, I was even more surprised.

If you sort by one run games for every team since 1901, the Braves rank dead last (#2212) in terms of one run game winning percentage. Yes, over the past 108 years, there has not been a team with a worse relative record in one run games in baseball. Which is pretty astounding.

It's also oddly uplifting, if you're a Braves fan though. See, one run games are primarily luck. Certainly not all luck, but certain "breaks" in the game often dictate how a one run game will shape out, and a 4-21 record is not indicative of the overall talent on Atlanta this year.

Also, the poor record in one run games would seem to indicate a shift in luck for the Braves -- despite the "losing mentality" that you hear about, Atlanta should see a reversal of fortune in some of these close games during the second half of the season.

Given the state of the National League East where Philly is kind-of-sort-of surging, but no one is dominant, that could actually bear out pretty well for the ATL. The downside, of course, is that Braves players are dropping like flies to injury. Of course, not every baseball season is chock full of good luck. This might still be one of them that stays without.