It doesn’t look like anything to me: the Braves miraculously stave off Atlanta’ing, defeat the Dodgers to win the National League pennant for the first time since 1999
Granted, this is all just an elaborate setup to better last year’s colossal failure, by advancing to the World Series, where the Braves will inevitably humiliate themselves and likely get obliterated by the Astros’ murderers pitching rotation. After all, if you take the Braves’ last two World Series appearances (1996, 1999), they’re 2-8 with all eight of those losses happening in a row, so as if history hasn’t been on their side at any step of their playoff run, it’s even worse when it comes to the World Series.
I actually had a complex about the Houston Astros, which dates back to 2004 and 2005, when the Braves lost to the Astros in two straight NLDSes, with the latter one ending on an epic collapse of a game, which turned into a miserable 18-inning affair where the Astros won on a walk-off home run from a shitty player hitting off of an even shittier pitcher.
From then on, I basically loathed the Astros, especially since they were still in the National League at the time, and I basically rooted for anyone they played against. One of the best games I remember going to was at the tail-end of 2006, when the Braves had a shit season where their streak of division titles came to an end, but at least they salvaged the end of the season by spoiling the Astros’ late-season playoff push, most notably in a game where the vaunted Roger Clemens was outpitched by a literal Lowes window installer named Chuck James.
The grudge held for quite a while until I stopped caring about sports and baseball as much, and then I accepted that flavors change and ebb and flow, to the point where I even started rooting for them in 2017, when I watched them pick up Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran, and I felt that these veterans were the key acquisitions that would push them into legitimate contention, and the season became a game of just wanting to be right, plus the Braves were in the midst of a dreadful rebuild and not even worth paying any attention to. Regardless of the eventual cheating scandal that was unearthed, I was happy with their World Series win that year.
And now we’re at a point where the World Series is going to be the Houston Astros versus the Atlanta Braves. Feels weird to even type “World Series” and “Atlanta Braves” in the same sentence after all the decades of failure I’ve witnessed at this point. The Astros are the team most people outside of Houston love to hate, due to the cheating scandal, and the Braves and their paltry 88-wins are the team that really had no business even being in the playoffs, much less the World Series, but the playoffs are basically a different stratosphere, and nobody would have guessed that Eddie Rosario would be the guy playing the role of Reggie Jackson this year.
I don’t really know how to feel. I want to be happy and excited that the Braves have made it to the World Series, but the oft-burned and jaded sports fan in me wants to pump the brakes and temper expectations, because it is still an Atlanta team ascending to the biggest games, and all of us here in Georgia have seen for eons what typically happens in those scenarios. As much I want to see the Braves win a championship, I’m more anxious that we’ll see another 1996 or a 1999, or a 28-3, or a Tua Tagovailoa, or any other examples of a massive Atlanta blunder that results in a humiliating defeat that begs to ponder if it would’ve been better to just suck and not even put ourselves in that position. I’m quite tired of Atlanta being the butt of sports city jokes, and another championship failure while so close to the crown, while not definitively unbearable, I just don’t want to think about it if it happens.
It figures that when I proclaimed that I wouldn’t write about the playoffs again, this actually happened. So I’ll maintain that I’ll try to limit my baseball talk to this post seeing as how I still have a queue of topics that I want to catch up to, and hope for the best while not watching or following any of the games, because I, and I alone, have the power to kill the Braves, solely by tuning in.
