Magic number? What magic number? Freddie Freeman insisted Friday afternoon that he didn’t know the Braves magic number to win the National League East was down to a quite manageable 10 entering the weekend series with the Washington Nationals.
Really (insert disbelieving tone)?
“Really,” he said.
Such determined obliviousness is well in keeping with the veteran first baseman’s approach to this team’s surprising bulge in the standings here with just a bit more than two weeks left on the schedule. With a fat 7 1/2-game lead in the East, a little premature celebration – especially for a team that has lost 90 or more games the past three seasons – would it understandable.
But not to Freeman.
“It doesn’t matter how big your lead is,” he said. “I was part of the 2011 team, so until we have officially clinched the playoffs you got to keep your foot on the gas pedal.” In that painful season, the Braves were as much as 7-1/2 games up in the wild-card race late in the season before going into a 9-18 September swoon and missing the postseason.
“Nothing is for sure in this game, we found that out the hard way seven years ago,” Freeman said. “Everybody was comfortable in 2011 and we lost that lead. The thing I’m going to try to express around here is you got to go full throttle until we are in. You can’t get comfortable because once you get comfortable in this game it comes back and slaps you in the face.”
Atlanta’s sports fans and its teams are accustomed to regular slaps in the face. Freeman, for one, was at least able to chuckle at the memory of the most famous of the many local blown leads, the Falcons’ Super Bowl fall after leading 28-3. He remembers watching that one at a buddy’s house, that buddy being Hall of Famer Chipper Jones. “I watched Chipper slowly sulk into his couch. I remember that very well,” Freeman said.
For all the still-apprehensive fans out there, those afraid to commit happiness to the Braves’ big lead, you’re not alone.
“Still just trying to win tonight’s game,” manager Brian Snitker said, hitting the mute button on any celebration. “That’s kind of the mode we’ve been in for a while now. Just do everything we can to win tonight.”
How this team and its young core is adapting to a playoff race, one in which they have assumed a stunningly large lead, is the fascination of the moment.
Freeman looks across the clubhouse, to where the likes of 20-year-old Ronald Acuna Jr. and 21-year-old Ozzie Albies reside, and wonders exactly what they’re thinking about all this.
“I don’t think these guys understand they’re in a playoff race. Those guys over there in that corner, they’re just having so much fun,” he said.
“They’re like brothers over there, they’re just messing around playing baseball and the next thing you know, boom, we’re winning another game and they got two hits again. Helmets are flying around everywhere. They’re dancing in the dugout. I think what we have going on around here is great.”
How the team as a whole has reacted was spelled out in the just completed 6-1 road trip. That coming off would could have been a dispiriting home sweep at the hands of the Boston Red Sox.
“I learned how resilient they were,” Snitker said. “How they do stay in the present. They do keep it segmented in today’s game.” The Braves were coming off their toughest loss of the year vs. the Red Sox, giving up eight runs in the last two innings in the final game of that series. They then flew to Arizona, gave up a two-run lead in the ninth the next day, only to win the game in the 10th.
What most impressed Freeman was how the Braves, while out west, saw the nightly struggles of their closest pursuer, Philadelphia, and went about their business unaffected.
“I thought we’ve done a really good job in the last couple of days of seeing the Phillies lose when we had to wait three hours, and going out and still playing well that night,” Freeman said. “That was a big boost for us. For me, to see our team handle that and go out there and play well, that was huge.”
And, just in case, anyone in that Braves clubhouse is in need of a shot of perspective or inspiration in the next two weeks, a visit to Freeman’s locker may be in order.
He’d tell them to just keep doing what they’ve been doing.
“The hunger is real,” he said Friday.
“I want to get back. I want to win a World Series and I feel like we have the right group of people in this clubhouse to accomplish that. No one has picked us, and I think that helps us. We’re going out there playing baseball, having fun playing baseball. I think that’s working in our favor.”
