HOUSTON — During a homestand from hell, Dana Brown received a reminder of his own words. He coined a phrase during his four-year stint as Atlanta’s vice president of scouting and repeated it during the Braves’ most trying times, usually to calm the president of baseball operations and general manager Alex Anthopolous’ constant concerns.
Brown now finds himself confronting some of those same worries. His team can’t win at home, refuses to beat teams it should and spent most of the past seven days ceding control of the American League West to its intrastate rivals. The team has lost five of its past six games, including three against the American League’s worst team.
During one of those defeats, Brown’s wife, Casandra, sent her husband a text message telling him exactly what he always told Anthopolous: “You have to have the stomach for this.”
“It’s tough. It’s a battle. It’s a grind. It’s 162 games,” Brown said Sunday during the team’s pregame radio show. “We’re still in the wild card right now. We want to win the division. We still have a clear path to win the division, we just have to win games.”
Brown then witnessed another one-run loss against one of baseball’s bottom feeders, a stomach-churning setback to cloud the clear path he promised…
