The season was going wrong. The Braves made it go right

Every season is a grind. Last season, such as it was, was a grind on a bicycle. To make the playoffs with a COVID-slashed slate, a team had to start fast and keep peddling. The 2020 Braves spent one day – opening day, to be precise – under .500. The 60-game schedule began July 24. They were never more than a game and a half out of first place. By Aug. 17, they were on top to stay.

For the longest time, 2021 was a grind on a hamster wheel, which is to say the Braves spent forever going nowhere. After 60 games, they were 29-31, having lost consecutive walk-offs in Philadelphia. They were 4-1/2 games behind the Mets, four back of the Phillies. It would take another 50 games for the Braves to nose above .500. And yet: Only once, and for just that day, were they more than four games below break-even.

Last season brought a special anxiety, never – let’s hope, anyway – to be repeated. In 2020, there were no vaccines. If you were working in MLB, you wore a mask and hoped the tests came back negative. The pandemic isn’t over, but the sport has regained more than a bit of normalcy. Tests are no longer a daily occurrence. Fans can watch in person.

Granted, some of what happened over this season’s first four months was unwatchable. A team of proven worth was losing games in ways a team of proven worth shouldn’t. There were nights/days when manager Brian Snitker, a baseball lifer, appeared – via Zoom, which is how scribes converse with managers and players – to be straining not to say what was uppermost in his mind, which might have been, with pertinent adjectives removed, “We’re better than this.”

Asked about that Wednesday, Snitker laughed. Then he said: “You’ve probably done a good job from far away of hitting that right on the head.” (Journalistic confession: It happens, though not often.)

Then Snitker said: “There were times I was very frustrated with some things, but you have to handle it. Every now and then I’ll overreact, maybe. We’re all human. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes you have to navigate around it and through it to get your point across.”

It wasn’t as if anybody stopped caring. Sometimes you’re just unlucky. Guys get hurt. Balls fall in, though not the balls you’re hitting. (Ask Freddie Freeman.) Only one of the 30 MLB clubs has lost more one-run games. Only four have lost more extra-inning games. So much went wrong it was hard to imagine anything going right. But here the Braves are.

In their first game of the regular season’s final week, the Braves beat second-place Philadelphia 2-1 on Tuesday. Charlie Morton, signed to win just this sort of game, threw seven scoreless innings. Jorge Soler, one of Alex Anthopoulos’ many July additions, drove home two runs with a single off Zack Wheeler. Will Smith did the Will Smith tap dance in the ninth inning. The Braves’ lead grew to 3-1/2 games with five (or six) to go. Their magic number shriveled to three.

The Braves have won eight of nine. For good reason, they regard this as their time of the year. Said Snitker: “They don’t know anything else but this strenuous September baseball. A lot of them came on the scene here, and next thing you know, they’re in a pennant race. It’s been a norm for their career. They have a ball with it. That first year (2018), I felt like I was in a dugout with an American Legion team, the way they were carrying on and competing and enjoying the moment.”

Ronald Acuna hasn’t played since July. Marcell Ozuna has been gone since May. Mike Soroka has worked two spring-training innings since August 2020. Those are major talents. Not many teams could lose all three and make the playoffs.

“We’ve always had that belief in ourselves,” Snitker said. “We did a good job of staying in it. It took like three-quarters of the season to get anything going. In its own way, this has been as tough as last year, with every day a continued fight. This has been one for the ages, too.”

Those who were around in the ‘90s grew accustomed to seeing the Braves play deep into October every year. These Braves are about to win the National League East for a fourth consecutive year. Their manager kept his cool, and not incidentally, his team got hot.