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Monday, September 3, 2007
History says Braves still have a shot
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
With the season shrinking, the New York Mets refuse to lose, and every once in a while, the Braves actually win. That isn’t the best scenario for the choppers and the chanters, especially since mediocrity began taking the field with their heroes after the All-Star break.
It’s just that stuff happens in baseball. Even though the Braves trail the Mets in the National League East by 7 1/2 games and sit behind much of the Western Hemisphere for the wild card, well, you know …
Stuff happens in baseball. Said Bobby Cox, the astute manager, analyzing his Braves on Monday at Turner Field after a 5-1 romp over the Philadelphia Phillies, “So we’re just going to have to run a streak here and see what happens.”
Stuff may happen for the Braves, because it has happened before. During The Last Great Pennant Race, they trailed the San Francisco Giants by 10 games before finishing with 104 victories to the Giants’ 103.
“We were all in the outfield watching the big screen [at old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium] as the Giants lost,” said Braves president Terry McGuirk, his eyes sparkling with the memory.
Added McGuirk, “We just have to keep our dobber up, because from here to the end, it’s all about pressure. And we should be loose, because we sort of made a very tough road for ourselves. The other guys are going to be extremely tight. All you can hope for at this point is to apply pressure and see what happens.”
This time, the Braves threw a noose around the Phillies’ neck and kept yanking. In other words, the Braves did what they need to do. Which was what they used to do throughout their record streak of 14 consecutive division titles through 2005.
Timely hitting. Crisp fielding. Solid starting pitching, followed by the bullpen using more water than gasoline on fires. Said catcher Brian McCann, who poked a two-run double into the corner, “It’s a step. It’s another step toward getting us close to the playoffs.”
In contrast, the Braves took several steps backward last weekend after scoring just four runs during the Mets’ three-game sweep. But stuff happens in baseball. I mean, there was 1964, when the St. Louis Cardinals trailed the ancestors to these Phillies by 6 1/2 games with 12 games left to play.
Those Phillies didn’t win the pennant, by the way.
Remember 1969? Everybody likes to mention how the Chicago Cubs choked away a World Series trip in September, but there also was that surge for the ages (or at least for the latter part of the decade) by the Miracle Mets. “You also had the New York Giants back in the day, and that was the most exciting comeback I’ve ever heard about,” raves pitcher Tim Hudson, recalling Bobby Thomson’s 1951 dramatics, as in “The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant.”
From the other side of the Braves clubhouse, Mark Teixeira mentioned the 2002 Oakland A’s, “They won 20 games in a row, and they eventually made it to the playoffs,” said Teixeira, of a team that surged from 4 1/2 games behind in early August to an insurmountable lead of four ahead in early September.
Oh, and Teixeira’s father, John, played high school baseball with Bucky Dent, the Great Satan around Boston. It was Dent’s blast in 1978 that sealed the New York Yankees’ ridiculous sprint from a 14-game deficit to send the Red Sox home for the rest of October.
“We were Orioles fans living in Baltimore, so [Dad] sort of mentioned something about that [Dent] home run to me whenever the Red Sox or Yankees came to town,” Teixeira said, before returning to the present, where the Braves have just 24 games left to make stuff happen. “It’s not something that we talk about all day long, but we sit around and go, ‘You know what? We can do this. We can still do this.’”
Yes, they can.
Will they?
The problem for the Braves is, Dent is retired.
So is Thomson.
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