Where is the comparable pitching ranking? Don't think anyone ever said the Braves' pennant run was due to their overpowering offense.
The point is this: the front office is selling a very specific narrative about our glory days. And that narrative is "Pitching, pitching, pitching." Everything was about pitching, and thus everything should be about pitching. We won with pitching in the 90's, so it makes sense for us to focus almost exclusively on pitching in our re-build.
Set aside whether the lessons of 1991 are relevant to 2015. That narrative is greatly over-simplified. As the numbers up there show, we generally had really effective offenses. The only seasons where we won with pitching and a crummy offense were 2001 and 2002. We could usually hit the ball. Remember the offensive talent we brought up in the early glory days: Gant, Justice, Meta Brian Hunter, Blauser, Chipper, Javy, Klesko.
Now, yes, the strength of those teams was the pitching. But if you're going to use the division champion Braves' teams as a model for your re-build, you need to keep this in mind: those teams didn't have good pitching or even great pitching. They had
extraordinary pitching. Those were some of the greatest rotations in the history of Major League Baseball. They were fronted by three Hall of Famers, one of whom is one of the five or six greatest pitchers in the history of the game. That's the standard for which you're aiming. It's a big ask, and building that sort of pitching staff requires an otherworldly combination of shrewdness and luck.
