From ‘it’s just not their year’ to world champs

HOUSTON — Most of the season, it just seemed this wasn’t their year.

          They dropped their first four games, and soon injuries piled up. They lost their most dynamic player before the All-Star break. They were stuck below .500 in August.

          Yet out of nowhere, suddenly, these Atlanta Braves transformed themselves and took off.

          How proud The Hammer himself would’ve been.

Fried finds footing in a big way

          Max Fried found his footing on the mound for the Atlanta Braves after getting stepped on early in Game 6 of the World Series.

          The young left-hander looked like an ace again, and the Braves clinched their first championship since 1995, which came only a few months before Fried's second birthday.

World Series champs, Braves style: pitching

          Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz and Steve Avery started games for the Braves in the 1995 World Series. It was one of the best pitching staffs of all time. The Braves expected to get excellent pitching from the group and did during their run to winning the ‘95 Series.

          The Braves began the 2021 playoffs with starters Charlie Morton, Max Fried, Ian Anderson and Huascar Ynoa. It’s a rotation with few postseason accomplishments outside of Morton. The Braves hoped to get effective pitching from that group. Then Ynoa couldn’t pitch in the National League Championship Series because of a bad shoulder and Morton broke his leg in the third inning of Series Game 1.

          It didn’t matter.

Mediocre to majestic

          HOUSTON – On April 2, they had a losing record. On June 2, they had a losing record. On Aug. 2, they had a losing record.

          On Nov. 2, they became world champions.

          The Braves, who’d become a running joke for their inability to get it right in the postseason, completed one of the most astonishing runs the grand old game has ever seen, winning Game 6 by a landslide –final score: 7-0 – and the World Series 4-2. They did it behind Max Fried, a pitcher who was 1 year, 9 months and 10 days old when the Atlanta Braves claimed their first championship. (Another lefty won Game 6 on Oct. 28, 1995 – Tom Glavine.)

Box Score

Amazing facts from the clincher

15 in-season trades that led to the Series

 

From expectations to chuggin’ along to champs

          When the Braves reported to spring training in February, they had championship aspirations. They fell just short last October and spent the winter supplementing a talented young core that’d embarked on three postseason runs. They entered this season believing they’d assembled a roster, both talent and chemistry-wise, that could finally break through.

          Nobody could’ve imagined how the ensuing journey would unfold.

Where was Architect Alex A.? Home

Summer castoff to MVP

          HOUSTON — A spare piece no more, Jorge Soler drove a pitch over the train tracks, out of Minute Maid Park and deep into the heart of Texas. He dropped his bat, tapped his chest twice and jabbed a hand toward the Atlanta Braves dugout.

          Three months earlier, he was a .192 hitter on a fourth-place team.

          Two weeks ago, he was sidelined by COVID-19.

          Now, a World Series star, finishing off the Houston Astros for the Braves’ first World Series title since 1995.

Four decades later, ultimate reward for Snit

          Brian Snitker borrowed plenty from Bobby Cox learning to lead a clubhouse.

          Now, he's matched his mentor in chasing down the game's greatest prize, joining Cox as the only Atlanta Braves managers to win the World Series.

          The championship clinched with Tuesday night's 7-0 Game 6 win over the Houston Astros was the payoff on Snitker's investment of 44 years as a Braves lifer. After a long career as player, instructor, coach and manager in the Braves’ organization, the 66-year-old Snitker has earned his place in team history.

One lifers gets a ring, one is still looking

          HOUSTON — Thousands of toothpicks have bitten the dust, yet Dusty Baker needs more.

          Time ticks louder for this most beloved of baseball lifers, still the winningest manager without a World Series title.

Snitker: a baseball life reaches the pinnacle

          Atlanta Braves bench coach Walt Weiss considered the question.

          It was the last home game the team would play this season — regardless of the outcome — and as his manager stood for selfies with fans who arrived two-and-a-half hours before first pitch, Weiss contemplated the journey it took to get there and wondered: If his career had gone like Brian Snitker’s — a couple minor league seasons as a player, followed by decades coaching his way through the farm system, making it to the big-league staff, only to be sent back down to manage Triple-A before finally breaking through as a first-time major-league manager at 60 — would he have stuck with it?

          Weiss shook his head and thought for a moment.

          “I don't know. I don't know if I could have done that,” he said, “It would have been very easy to just start doing something else.”

Good ratings for Fox

Some Braves fans – OK, most - didn’t believe till it hit Freddie’s glove

 

21 reasons why this was so very unexpected

HOUSTON — The Braves are World Series champions again, for the fourth time in franchise history and the second time since they move to Atlanta in 1966.

This is easily the most unlikely of the four titles. Maybe that makes it the most special. Who knows? That’s a conversation for a different time, though, and one that really only lifelong Braves fans can have. 

 

More pregame

Braves thought about trading “(expletive) stud” Riley

          HOUSTON — Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson stands by the batting cage, looks at the 24-year-old kid taking swings and stops talking.

          “I’ve got to be honest,’’ says Jackson, special advisor to the Houston Astros, “I never heard of this kid before. Never saw him play before. Man, has he ever gotten my attention. This kid can really play."

 Notes: High school buddies – and major-leaguers – watching Fried

 Baker’s wristbands a personal touch, on display

          HOUSTON -- Astros manager Dusty Baker was standing in the elevator at their team hotel in Atlanta when outfielder Marwin Gonzalez’s 5-year-old son tugged at his dad’s arm, and whispered.

          “Daddy, that’s the man who gives out the wristbands,’’ Brooks Gonzalez said. “I got one.’’

          Baker is famous for a lot of things, leading the Astros to the World Series, but with the Fox-TV cameras now zeroed in on him every night, those wristbands are in the national spotlight.

          They are the most unique wristbands in baseball, with Baker’s face from his playing days, emblazoned on each wristband.

Fried had nowhere to pitch 10 years ago

          Max Fried wasn’t sure what to do next.

          It was 10 years ago, in the summer before his senior season of high school, that Fried’s world got turned upside down.

          The private Van Nuys high school where the left-handed pitcher had become a top draft prospect as an underclassman, Montclair Prep, announced it would be dropping its sports programs, effective immediately. Just weeks before his final school year, Fried suddenly found himself without a team.

          “I had nowhere to go,” he said.

          A decade later, it’s a story that puts his present predicament in perspective.

 

Late innings=late night: games are long and late

Was Fried tipping pitches in Game 2?

Postgame

 

CEEEELEBRATE, GOOD TIMES, COME ON!