Players Only Team Meeting

Reverse insomnia has me up and scanning the tubes very early most mornings for all the latest on our team, plus oddly enough I will often have a song stuck in my brain. 

Today's song: Reason to Believe.

Yeah, I know ... pretty weird.  That is, at least to me, in the sense of fateful or errie.

So, then I happen across Bowman's article from last night on the Players Only Team Meeting, chaired by David Ross and also featuring Chipper Jones, Eric Hinske and Billy Wagner as the primary speakers. 

Of course, all this got me thinking. 

Bobby Cox, as I understand it, has never been big on meetings and rah-rah cheerleading of a group of adult professional baseball players who are well-paid to show up and do their jobs.  And thus team meetings are not very much a part of  the Braves clubhouse culture. 

But, when a team has truly world-class veteran leadership the likes of Rossy, Chipper, Hinsk and Wags who take the initiative and step up to the front and re-frame the final fourteen games of a long season, exactly what kind of impact might that actually have?

A few paragraphs with key quotes from the article:

"We don't panic," Ross said. "We're relaxed. We just wanted to make sure everybody was focused and ready to get back to doing what we were doing."

Wagner doesn't like team meetings for the simple fact that they only occur during rough stretches of a season. But he walked away from this with a sense that it could prove to be positive.

"Meetings allow everybody to know that we're all on the same page," Wagner said. "We all know what's going on. You just relax and do what you've got to do. We're all going to have good games and bad games. You can't go out there and worry about having one or the other. You just have to go out there and play hard."

So, here is the thing:  My feeling has been and remains that this is our year; that the 2010 Atlanta Braves are a Team Of Destiny; that somehow, someway they will be in the World Series and they may indeed win it all.

And when I say this type of thing, I am not kidding.  I mean it.  Just like on the Open Threads, when I make calls of impending homeruns - which I've done three times recently and am a perfect three of three, although last night on Nate's 9th inning bomb, I was off by one pitch (the two previous ones were to the exact pitch)... so, obviously, these feelings are not exactly infallible.

But my point is the intangible factor.  Call it luck, karma, an aura, the alignment of the universe, or what you will. It is out there.

I will stop all this blather now. 

However, I am sticking to my position that our team is still going to do it and will be in the World Series.

And the team meeting yesterday may just have been just the thing, the impetus, the organic or autonomic force. 

Anybody else feeling or maybe still looking for a reason to believe?