Section 435 An Atlanta Braves blog. From the upper deck at Turner Field.

Kotsay’s Got a Gun

Atlanta 3, New York Mets 1. The game ended up living up to its pitcher’s duel billing. Smoltz threw five, two hits, no earned runs. Santana threw 7 strong, giving up only 1 run, but he proved to be mortal which will be psychologically important as the year rolls on. Smoltz was padding his big career K numbers, but also walked some folks. Santana was much more efficient, pitching to contact, getting a lot of ground ball outs. The pitch counts after the first inning: Smoltz 25, Santana 11.

The NL is going to learn pretty quickly that you don’t run on Mark Kotsay. The man has a cannon in center field. He doubled up Delgado in the 4th, which was almost his second of the series. Anything we lost in range when Andruw left for Tinseltown we’ll more than make up for with Kotsay’s arm. Between him and Frenchy, we’re going to see a lot outfield assists this year.

I don’t think anyone would have expected to hear this, but a lot of folks were glad to have KJ back in the lineup yesterday… for his defense.

Do you blog at the actual games? Just curious. I will add your site. peace

-Dan

My liveblogging will be pretty limited. I figure TV and radio and live gamecasts ala MLB.com have the play-by-play pretty well covered. But I will have my BlackBerry handy in case something interesting and timely comes up.

Thanks for the linkage!

[...] not the only one who is showing the mad Kotsay love this [...]