The Atlanta Braves’ Season Was Over — Until Somehow It Wasn’t
A sprawling recap of the 2021 Atlanta Braves’ World Series championship season, from Opening Day to the clinching out. I’m actually still quite unsure how it happened, even after writing all these words.
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The baseball team from the greater Atlanta metropolitan area, the Braves, defeated all the other baseball teams, improbably so, in 2021, and won the dadgum World Series. It mathematically, cosmically, scientifically, and perhaps at times even spiritually should not have happened. Because of journey > destination-related ideas, I have determined that it is good to go back through the entire season of Atlanta Braves baseball, just to show you how improbable this thing really was.
With the benefit of hindsight and sunglasses made necessary by the searing glow of the 2021 Commissioner’s Trophy, you may know that NLCS Most Valuable Player and supreme lord of Georgia Eddie Rosario was not a member of the Atlanta baseball team at the beginning of the season. Was in fact a member of the Cleveland now-Guardians, and was acquired for Pablo Sandoval. In online communication spaces, as Rosario’s autumnal coronation commenced, many scoffed at the swindling, like showing your pal the nice recliner you snagged off some poor Facebook Marketplace shmuck, saying can you believe he took 50 bucks for this??
I am here to overextend the metaphor and eagerly to remind you of the value of 50 bucks as well as Pablo Sandoval, as the rotund profferer of hugs carried the Braves the first month of the season. Game-tying home run in the season opener. Game-winning home run the next week. A two-out, two-strike, two-run homer in the bottom of the 9th that helped to wrangle one of the wildest wins of the Atlanta season in early May over the Phillies. He’d have just four more hits and no homers in the near-three months until his offering up for Eddie, yet: let us briefly unbesmirch the Panda, who truly Did Some Things for the title-winning Braves.
For the better part of what seemed like forever, the 2021 Atlanta Braves — would-have-been MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. notwithstanding — did not Do Some Things. The afternoon of April 25th, in particular…
