It wasn’t long ago when the late September in Atlanta meant there was a buzz not just about the start of football season, but the Braves competing for home-field advantage for the postseason. Of if they’d clinched early, as they often did, the last week of the season was about resting players and setting the rotation for the first-round matchup.
Not this year. There’s no buzz at Turner Field as the fourth-place Braves prepare for a season-ending six-game homestand that starts Tuesday against the Washington Nationals.
The Braves’ divisional dynasty days have faded, the last of their run of 14 consecutive division titles coming in 2005. This will be the 15th consecutive season without a postseason-series win for the Braves. And in the past decade they’ve only played in two division series and a wild-card game.
Still, it’s been a while since a final week of the season felt as empty as this one, even with traditional NL East rival Washington and NL perrenial power St. Louis as the opponents. There’s little for the Braves to play for other than pride and avoiding 100 losses — a low-bar standard that looked to be their destiny until last week, when the Braves swept the Phillies and won two of three against the Mets at New York to get to 62 wins.
Now, even after getting knocked around and swept by the young-and-surging Marlins over the weekend, the Braves need just one win to avoid the franchise’s first 100-loss season since 1988
Not that they would be pleased with one win. The Braves want to get back the good feeling they had last week.
“As good as (the) road trip started with the great series we had in New York, we didn’t play particularly well in Miami,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “So, off day (Monday), then we’ve got six games at home. Hopefully we get to win a couple of series and call it a year.”
The Braves would surely like take advantage of the depressed state of the Nationals, eliminated from playoff contention over the weekend. A World Series favorite entering the season, the Nationals are only four games over .500 and reeling a bit after Sunday's dugout fight between teammates Jonathon Papelbon and young star Bryce Harper.
As disappointing as the season has became for the Braves – they were 42-42 on July 7 – they’ve managed to keep pulling for each other and avoid finger-pointing.
“Fortunately, I like what we do have,” said center fielder Cameron Maybin, signed through 2016. “I see a lot of potential in the future. We’ve just got to continue to play together. We’ve got to stay together these last few games.”
First-year Brave Nick Markakis played out the string plenty of times with Baltimore teams that were 20 or more games out during his nine-year career with the Orioles. It’s still difficult to go through, but he’s seen progress from young players.
“You can go through every young guy, every player in this room and pick out good things that have happened,” he said. “It’s just a building process, it’s a learning process. We’ve got a lot of guys that weren’t even on the roster at the beginning of the year. It’s all new to them. I’ve been in that situation. It’s tough. It’s tough to learn at this level, and that’s what we’re asking of a lot of these young guys.”
