Will Atlanta Braves Ever Win a World Series Again

If always a future baseball fan needs a reminder of the randomness inherent in the sport's postseason, if ever they desire a prototypical instance of playoff strangeness, they need look no farther than the story of this 2021 Atlanta lodge.

Run into, Atlanta shouldn't have come up anywhere near this World Series trophy. Its all-time player tore his ACL; its best immature pitcher missed the entire flavour after tearing his Achilles twice. It finished the regular flavor with a mere 88-73 record. It had more losses than wins at the stop of July.

Compared to previous iterations of this roster, which had evinced and so much hope but fallen so brusk in October, this version of the team wasn't annihilation special. Since 1995, the last time the franchise won a title, sixteen unlike Atlanta teams take managed a meliorate winning percentage than the 2021 vintage. Seventeen posted more batting WAR as a team, according to FanGraphs; eleven posted more pitching War. The average Atlanta team since 1995 has won 89 games per 162—one more than win, in other words, than this team managed in 161 regular-season contests.

And then many stars in that span lost out on so many championship chances. Chipper Jones never won another championship for Atlanta after 1995. Nor did Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, or John Smoltz. Partitioning-winning cores with Andruw Jones, Brian McCann, and Craig Kimbrel all stumbled in the playoffs, and oftentimes in baleful ways, dating all the way back to squandering a two-0 atomic number 82 in the 1996 World Serial. From 2010 through 2013 alone, Atlanta suffered in October from Brooks Conrad's errors, an umpire'due south dubious infield wing call, and Juan Uribe's moonshot with Kimbrel stranded in the bullpen. In 2020, a three-1 atomic number 82 in the NLCS shifted apace to a seven-game defeat.

And in 2021, none of that mattered—non the dispiriting by, not the erratic nowadays, not the broader cross-sport drapery that has settled over the Atlanta sports scene for a quarter-century. In 2021, Atlanta parlayed a mediocre roster into a playoff spot, then took advantage of the opportunity by racing past the favored Brewers, Dodgers, and Astros en route to a shocking title. In 2021, Atlanta blew a four-run atomic number 82 to the Astros in a potential championship clincher—and then cruised in its side by side opportunity just two days afterward.

With a seven-0 win in Game 6 on Tuesday, buoyed past home runs from Jorge Soler, Dansby Swanson, and Freddie Freeman, Atlanta won its first championship in 26 years and the 4th in franchise history. In a month full of upsets, Atlanta's title is the greatest of all—the culmination of ane of the most surprising playoff outcomes in contempo MLB history.

Atlanta posted that 88-win total, the worst for any sectionalisation winner by five wins and the worst for any playoff team period, all four wild cards included, despite playing the majors' easiest schedule. Atlanta went just 43-42 against teams outside its division and, within the sectionalization, feasted on dreadful opposition: No other NL Eastward team finished with a positive run differential. In whatever other sectionalization, Atlanta would have been well out of contention with a losing record at the end of July.

Merely in the NL East, Atlanta still had a dream, and GM Alex Anthopoulos made a medley of small moves to upgrade the roster for the stretch run. He traded for Joc Pederson on July 15 and Soler, Eddie Rosario, and Adam Duvall on July 30. At that point, co-ordinate to the FanGraphs playoff odds, Atlanta had less than a 10 per centum take chances of making the playoffs and less than a 1 percent chance of winning the Globe Series.

There is precedent for individual players to change teams then the fortunes of a franchise at the trade borderline. Every club wants its own 2008 CC Sabathia or 2004 Carlos Beltrán, even if neither of their teams won the championship. Merely to remake an unabridged unit with four new players? That bit of transactional transformation is new.

Nonetheless at that place is no overstating but how much those trades mattered, and just how much their targets achieved. In the playoffs, the outfield quartet combined for a .270/.339/.505 batting line. In other words, confronting the higher-caliber pitching of the postseason, Atlanta's iv new outfielders were collectively as productive at the plate as Manny Machado or Nelson Cruz were in the regular season.

The quartet was responsible for 56 percent of the squad's postseason RBIs (36 of 64) and 52 percent of its abode runs (12 of 23). And its members contributed many of Atlanta's most important hits along the way:

• Pederson crushed two pinch-hit homers—one a game-winner—in two games to offset the playoff run.
• Soler led off Game 1 of the World Series with a homer, then blasted the winning dingers in games 4 and 6, en route to winning series MVP honors.
• Duvall opened the scoring in Game 5 of the World Serial with a first-inning grand slam.
• And Rosario, most of all, paced the lineup all postseason long, producing a bonkers .383/.456/.617 slash line. His biggest hit came in Game 6 of the NLCS, when his tiebreaking 3-run homer against Walker Buehler sent Atlanta to the Earth Series.

Cheers to this scorching foursome, surprise contributions from the pitcher, and just plenty clutch hits to survive a slew of belatedly-game seesaws, Atlanta weathered seemingly crushing injuries to Ronald Acuña Jr. and Mike Soroka in the regular flavour, and Charlie Morton in the playoffs. Later on Morton broke his leg in Game 1 of the Globe Serial, Atlanta had all of 2 healthy starting pitchers left—only to no sick upshot, in the stop.

It's difficult to know, merely now, whether this miracle run will influence future team-building principles like the Cubs' and Astros' (embrace the tank!) or Dodgers' (aim for a sectionalization title every year!) triumphs have in contempo seasons. Would-be contenders want to replicate juggernauts. They don't desire to replicate a team that wins 88 games and reaches the postseason simply because of geographic luck.

Withal the club's enterprising spirit at the deadline is itself a lesson for the future—that equally long as a squad has a chance, information technology should endeavour to win and seize the day. For instance, Cleveland had a ameliorate record than Atlanta at the trade deadline, yet traded Rosario for mere salary relief. Three months after, he won NLCS MVP and raised the Earth Serial bays.

Try at the deadline, reach the postseason, and information technology's possible to upset three superior rosters in a row, as Atlanta did against the Brewers, Dodgers, and Astros. In a short series, Freeman can homer off Josh Hader, and Tyler Matzek tin can transform into Mariano Rivera circa 1996, and the lineups' performance with runners in scoring position tin both shift in one team'south favor.

For a squad that entered the postseason with so few expectations, Atlanta romped without as well much malaise—unlike the Nationals, who needed numerous belatedly-game comebacks in elimination games to win the Earth Series in 2019. In this postseason, afterwards Game one of the NLDS, Atlanta never trailed at whatsoever point in any serial again, nor did it ever lose two games in a row. It went 7-i at abode, delighting fans all calendar month long with a succession of tense wins, equally every home win came past iii runs or fewer:

• Won by 3 in Game 3 of the NLDS
• Won by 1 in Game 4 of the NLDS (featuring a game-winning homer in the eighth inning)
• Won past i in Game one of the NLCS (featuring a walk-off hit)
• Won by one in Game 2 of the NLCS (featuring a walk-off hitting)
• Won by two in Game half dozen of the NLCS
• Won by two in Game iii of the World Series
• Won by ane in Game 4 of the World Series (featuring dorsum-to-back game-tying and game-winning homers in the seventh inning)

(Those fans and the broader society and league infrastructure also provided the one notation of immense frustration from this Atlanta run: the nonstop Chop at Truist Park. That'southward an important caveat to an otherwise celebratory moment.)

Atlanta isn't the only team to win the World Series afterwards a relatively mediocre regular flavor. The 2006 Cardinals won 83 games, the 1987 Twins 85, the 2000 Yankees 87, and the 2014 Giants 88. This kind of outlier occurs about once a decade—and might soon abound more than mutual, if MLB expands its playoff field as desired.

Nevertheless that dissonance resonates all the more with this specific franchise: Since 1995, Atlanta has played the third-nigh playoff games of any lodge, backside just the Yankees and Cardinals, who accept both won multiple titles in that bridge. Atlanta'due south lost more of those games than it'due south won. Just what the NL E dynasty of the late 1990s and early 2000s couldn't attain again, and what the early teams of the Freeman era failed to reach, this underdog group managed with style.

Atlanta wasn't the majors' all-time squad from April to September; information technology wasn't all that close. It merely tried to win, and then it did. That's a reason for a trophy, and for the other 29 clubs to accept notation.

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Source: https://www.theringer.com/2021/11/3/22760721/atlanta-braves-world-series-champions-game-six-houston-astros

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