Posted on 09/17/2002 8:33:09 PM PDT by BluesDuke
Braves' Old World
by Jeff Kallman
Familiarity breeds indifference when not breeding contempt. Exhibit A, the Atlanta Braves; exhibits A-1 and A-1a, Mr. and Mrs. Greg Maddux.
Maybe securing the division clinch on their day off had something to do with it. Make no mistake of thinking the Braves earned nothing; they just earned it too soon. They turned a rickety April and a game but grinding May into a June prune, shearing to the hilltop and planting enough thorny thicket behind them to obstruct anyone even thinking about trespassing. It meant Maddux getting to spend what proved clinching day...watching Monday Night Football.
Maybe rolling up a twentysomething-game lead without coming up from a long-enough title famine had something to do with it. Kind of hard to get people hipped up to taking a hill when you have owned the property for ten seasons and counting. Even Greg Maddux, a pitcher not renowned for indifference despite his impassive mound countenance (which is excellent game face, for a guy who resembles his own kid brother), only kept his computer tuned in for the latest on the game that would mean the clinch.
Maybe the Braves conquering a National League East which would have had trouble against babies in carriages this season had something to do with it. The Philadelphia Phillies, the Washington Senators III In Waiting (you know them for now as the Montreal Expos), the Florida Marlins, and the New York Mess (excuse me - the Mets) are either tied for second or close enough. That can happen when none took a winning record to the day the Phillies and the Mets went at it (9 September) with the Braves off and one the magic number.
Maybe Mike Piazza all but winning the Braves the division clinch had something to do with it. Carrying a 3-0 lead to the top of the seventh, the Phillies decided to open their bullpen to Piazza and the Mets. And the Mets decided to open the proverbial can of whoop-ass they were supposed to have kept in gross and continuing stock all season long, given the real or alleged firepower they dealt for last winter. An RBI hit. A sacrifice fly. Piazza up with the bases loaded and taking Jose Santiago over the fence. Make it a 6-4 final for the Mets, Armando Benitez saving it the hard way in the ninth, giving up two hits and the fourth Philadelphia run when he wasn't busy striking out the side.
"Hey," Maddux hailed his wife. "We won again."
"Shocker," replied Mrs. Maddux dryly.
"Hey, OK," volleyed her knowing husband. Then, he returned to watching the New England Patriots bend the Pittsburgh Steelers in their bare hands.
Maybe the Braves making it look too easy to win division titles and too difficult to win much else beyond had something to do with it. Not around the Maddux household, but in towns not named Atlanta. Eleven straight division titles, good for five pennants but only one World Series ring.
There may be one thing more unfair than dismissing the Braves (as many enough have done) as the ballplayers in the gray flannel suits, the Atlanta Automatons who are so soberly businesslike afield that you think they could blow up half the world and think nothing of it. And that one thing is taking the Braves for granted. Name one club in the history of team sports who has ever won eleven straight consecutive division titles.
Neither can I. The best that even the New York Yankees have ever run are a couple of strings of five pennants in a row, one of which (1949-53) included five World Series in a row, including the fifth straight division title they have all but nailed down this season.
"In the old days, when it was strictly a matter of winning your league and advancing to the World Series," says Braves general manager John Schuerholz to the Los Angeles Times, "there was respect and appreciation for the teams that prevailed over the full season. Now, you not only have to win your division, but you have to survive three levels of playoffs. It's so much harder, and I think it's inappropriate when people dismiss the eleven titles just because we've won only one World Series in that time."
The season alignments do need an adjustment, of course. If the Selig regime insists on keeping the three division league alignments, rather than restoring the two-division leagues, then the least he could do is give the best record among the division winners opening round byes and let the other two winners in each league's divisions play a best-of-three to meet the better-record winners in a proper, best-of-five League Championship Series. And, get rid of interleague play and leave the World Series untouched and restored to its legitimate station.
But eleven division wins in a row with only five pennants and one World Series ring is a mark between underachievement and overrating. And the Braves know it. Not an especially charismatic crowd to begin with, the Braves are sometimes a difficult read and often times easy enough to ignore. There they go again, these mostly methodical marksmen who administer perhaps the most benign executions of any team in the game. The 1998 Yankees and last year's Seattle Mariners were the electric chair; the Braves are a lethal injection.
Their midsummer nights' swath through the National League East and the leagues (they were 15-3 in 2002 interleague play; only the 16-2 Oakland Athletics were better) still seems too remote and too textbook now. Charisma may be overrated but there is still nothing like a real hair-raiser to ripple the headlines and rev up the fans. Either a hair-raiser or a great heart tugger behind a race. And bless their sober selves, the Braves just couldn't raise up either one, which is neither their fault nor their vice.
The Minnesota Twins ran away with an American League Central even weaker than the Braves' conquered territory. But the Braves weren't trying to escape a death sentence because a baseball commissioner wanted to dump a welfare queen competitor out of reach from his team's regional market, opening (he hoped) by attrition a bigger welfare pot for the small market/small mind owners to boil.
The St. Louis Cardinals were pounded with the stench of death. First, a beloved Hall of Fame broadcaster, within hours - in a harrowing irony - of the last game pitched by a popular teammate who died shockingly enough before the end of that week. Then, a Hall of Fame outfielder a month and a half later. The Cardinals' fortitude and perseverance has them close enough to clinching the National League Central despite some dogged enough pursuit by the Houston Astros and some occasional forward pressing by the Cincinnati Reds.
And the hair-raisers? Westward, ho!
Those from-time-immemorial combatants in Los Angeles and San Francisco are playing incendiary ball with all the ardour and none of the animal antagonism of their Brooklyn and Manhattan ancestors. But these guys are playing for keeps and right to the last innings regardless, to probably the end of the season's final fortnight.
But they're playing for nothing but (ahem) "realistic" goals. They have played that way for several weeks. The Arizona Schillingjohnsons are sitting comfy enough in first place and, barring an unexpected disaster, likely to win a third of the main house. The Dodgers and the Giants seem too willing to settle for the guest house while the Snakes were taking a seven-game National League West lead. Now do you get why the wild card is corrosive rather than virtuous?
That makes the American League West your show of Show. The Anaheim Angels and the Oakland Athletics are making the Giants and the Dodgers resemble T-ball players admonished to remember it isn't "fair" to think about winning it all just yet, because losers are supposed to be extinct.
The Angels and the A's will have none of that jazz, thank you. These two crews want nothing less than a third of the main house. The A's took first blood in this week's four-game set in Oakland Monday night, but they know the Angels are playing as though the wild card doesn't exist. That's because the A's are playing with the same thinking. Neither one wants the guest house unless one just outraces, outhits, outpitches, outscores, outwins them down the final fortnight.
Maybe one of them will get to play the Braves in the World Series. Assuming the Braves get to play in the World Series. Whomever survives the National League wild card draw is coming up from a stronger division than the Braves' comparative patsies. And the Cardinals play for something soul deep that mortal supermen often cannot overtake.
Or maybe the Braves' worst enemy is and was...the Braves?
"Knowledgeable people in our industry know how difficult it is to achieve what we have," Schuerholz says, "but even some of those people are caught up in the societal view of what have you done lately, the view that if you don't win the last game you've done nothing."
But knowledgeable people also know the fact of it has to gnaw at the Braves. And with the questions open as to whether pitching bellwethers Maddux and Tom Glavine can be re-signed for one more hitch, there are other questions they may not dare ask themselves, never mind aloud. Questions like, instead of why eleven straight division winners equals no respect, how could a team cash in only one World Series in eleven straight division conquests and five pennants with four likely or very possible Hall of Famers together for most of those?
But it's so much easier to pity the teams that haven't.
Is that better?
But it's impossible to pity a team owned by Ted Turner.
Not this year Bucko!
GO BRAVES!
Yet, the dynasty's architect and prime contractor, Bobby Cox has been named Manager of the Year but once...
Not this year Bucko!
GO BRAVES!
As Ronald Reagan once said to another Georgian, "there you go again."
After 11 years a guy gets used to saying that.
But this year, this team, is truly different. And I say the Braves will win this year.
That's my story and I am sticking to it!
Cagey, get some popcorn - there's gonna be a brawl!
(Just kidding guys!)
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