Braves @ Dodgers July 30, 2014: Something Of A Stable Lineup

	Braves			Dodgers
	7:10pm PT			Los Angeles, CA
CF	B.Upton		2B	Gordon
2B	La Stella		CF	Puig
1B	Freeman		SS	Gonzalez
LF	J.Upton		1B	Ramirez
C	Gattis		RF	Kemp
3B	Johnson		LF	Van Slyke
RF	Doumit		3B	Uribe
RF	Schafer		C	Ellis
P	Wood (L)		P	Greinke (R)

Another day, another lineup without Andre Ethier, and while it’s fun to point out how sudden his disappearance was, the Braves also have lefty Alex Wood on the mound tonight, so it’s not like we were expecting Ethier to play, either. You’d expect he’d be in against righty Julio Teheran tomorrow night; then again, that’s after the trading deadline, so who knows, maybe John Lackey will be playing left field by then. (That’s how this works, right?)

In the meantime, Zack Greinke and the Dodgers miss out on Jason Heyward, sitting again with a sore back, but really, Don Mattingly seems to have found his “regular” lineup, if such a thing can exist. Carl Crawford and Scott Van Slyke make for a reasonable platoon in left. Yasiel Puig hasn’t killed anyone in center, yet. Matt Kemp has been hitting well and playing an acceptable right. It’s not great for Ethier, or for anyone who wants to see Joc Pederson, and again, this whole thing may be blown up in the next 24 hours anyway. But for now, it’s working. This is the lineup, and it’s really not a bad one. It needs to be, anyway; thanks in part to the Pirates making one of the dumbest plays in baseball history today, the Giants are still only 2.5 games back.

* * *

The Darwin Barney trade, by the way, was finished off when the Dodgers announced they’d be sending Single-A pitcher Jonathan Martinez to the Cubs. Martinez, a 20-year-old Venezuelan righty, had made 19 starts for the Loons this year, and was Dustin’s No. 19 prospect on the midseason list a few weeks ago. I feel like giving up anything higher than like the 48th-best prospect for Barney is too much, but then I’m not really all that broken up over a guy like Martinez leaving, either. None of us liked watching Miguel Sulbaran leave for Drew Butera, either, and maybe someday we’ll regret both, but at the moment, there’s a phenomenally higher chance that Barney plays for the Dodgers than Martinez ever would have.

Barney was not immediately added to the Dodgers, instead being optioned to Triple-A, where he’ll get back up to speed — he’s played all of two games in the last three weeks — and see some playing time at shortstop and third, presumably joining the Dodgers at some point in August, at which point people will fret far too much about Miguel Rojas going down, all while forgetting that Rojas is hardly irreplaceable and would likely be returning shortly thereafter when rosters expand anyway.

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