On the day after the Atlanta Braves claimed their first National League East title since 2005, the great closer Craig Kimbrel was asked why baseball players believe every chance to celebrate should be seized and hoisted on high. “Because it’s hard!” he said, almost laughing at the question. “It’s hard to win the division.”
Though the Braves of not-so-distant vintage made finishing first seem old hat, it never was. Every regular season was different, even as 14 consecutive completed regular seasons turned out the same. But that run of excellence was an achievement baseball had never seen and won’t see again. For a time, it spoiled us Atlantans. The 2013 Braves stand as a reason why we should never look askance at division titles.
“This is the test,” manager Fredi Gonzalez said of baseball’s six-month season. “You know it’s going to have its ups and downs. And winning may not ever come around again.”
Greg Walker, the batting coach, recalled his playing days. “We won the division when I was a rookie (with the White Sox) in 1983,” he said. “We had great young pitching; we thought we were going to be a dynasty. We never won it again.”
Kimbrel pointed across the clubhouse to a fellow reliever’s locker. “Scott Downs got drafted in 1997 and has been in the majors for 13 years, and this is the first time he’s gotten to jump and down.”
Unless Cincinnati overhauls St. Louis in the NL Central, four of the six division winners figure to be different from last season. Boston fired Bobby Valentine and went from worst to first. Washington, which won 98 games last year, didn’t sniff first place in the NL East after this season’s first weekend. Assuming Detroit takes the AL Central, the Tigers will hold the longest active streak of division titles — at three.
The Braves, who for 14 seasons did nothing but finish first, had a long slog back to the summit. This marks the fourth consecutive season they’ve won at least 89 games, but in 2010 and 2012 they settled for a wild card and the Epic Collapse of 2011 blew even that. This time they led almost wire to wire — April 4 marked the only day they didn’t hold first place — and built a 16-game lead in mid-August. They made it look rather easy, except that winning a division is never easy and winning for this particular team involved alternate routes.
As the Braves celebrated their clinching in Chicago on Sunday, some among them told Gonzalez that cameras had caught him dabbing at his eyes in the dugout after Washington’s loss to Miami brought the magic number to zero. Gonzalez insisted Monday that he didn’t actually tear up. (Though he’d have cause, this being his first division title as manager.)
“It was a sigh of relief,” he said. “There’s a lot of pent-up emotion. You sit in the dugout for 140 or 150 of these games and when you win you feel like, ‘Whew.’”
The man had earned his moment of exhalation. He’d taken a team that saw its two highest-salaried players hit under .190; that lost its two best left-handed relievers to surgery; that lost two starting pitchers to injury; that lost the catalytic Jason Heyward to two different forms of surgery … and still that team awoke Monday with the best record in the National League. That took real managing.
Already this manager was back at it. “You’ve got to figure out the (postseason) rotation, who might need a breather,” Gonzalez said. “You’ve got to try to get the (league’s) best record. It never ends.”
Here he smiled. “But we did get to enjoy those two hours (Sunday).”
That’s no small thing. How many of us who work in the Real World ever get the chance to jump up and down and act like 6-year-olds on a sugar rush? How many of us, even for two fleeting hours, get to feel that good?
The postseason could yield more celebration, or it could yield a quick dismissal. (One thing for sure: The Braves won’t be subject to another wretched wild-card game, which is all the more reason to toast this title.) But the postseason is a different animal and for now the Braves have done all they can. They’re bound for October as division champs. “You don’t take that for granted,” Kimbrel said, and we need only look toward the Nationals as reason why.
Last September, first-place Washington made the corporate choice to shutter Stephen Strasburg and protect his prized arm. To many, that decision smacked of hubris: “We’ll be back here a bunch of times,” the Nats seemed to be saying. A year later, they’re going nowhere. A year later, they’re looking up at the Atlanta Braves.
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