From Afterthoughts to World Series Champs: How the Braves Shattered Expectations – Bleacher Report

AP Photo/David J. Phillip

At long last, a playoff result that hasn’t left the hearts of Atlanta sports fans utterly broken. And on account of it coming in the World Series, the team that got it done can now count itself among the greatest in the history of Major League Baseball.

And furthermore, perhaps the most unlikely member of that particular club.

To be sure, the Fall Classic in and of itself was mostly a dominant affair for the victors. Atlanta may have been outscored by the Houston Astros 16-7 in its two losses, but it collected its four wins to the tune of an 18-4 drubbing punctuated by not one but two shutouts.

The second, for those who missed it or simply want to see it again, was a 7-0 rout in Game 6 that ended when Will Smith got Yuli Gurriel to ground weakly to Dansby Swanson:

Of all the players who got in on the fun Tuesday at Minute Maid Park, the pivotal crowd-silencing moment was provided by Jorge Soler. His three-run home run off Luis Garcia in the third inning was worthy of Albert Pujols and ultimately would have been enough to deliver Atlanta its first World Series championship since 1995 all on its own:

That blast pushed Soler’s home run tally for the series to three, each of which put Atlanta in the lead. So, let there be no doubt that he deserved to be named the World Series MVP.

If you’re just now joining us after waking up from a nap that began in October 2020, you might be unsurprised that Atlanta has won the World Series but confused as to how Soler got there.

For that matter, what’s he doing sharing a dugout with Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall and Joc Pederson? Shouldn’t Ronald Acuna Jr. be somewhere in there? And what ever became of Marcell Ozuna? Of Mike Soroka? And is that Charlie Morton? If so, why does he have a cast on his leg?

Short answer: Try as the baseball gods might to stamp out Atlanta in 2021, they just couldn’t.

Atlanta Players of the Game

• LHP Max Fried: 6.0 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 6 K. Amid a series marked by bad starting pitching, the young left-hander turned in the series’ first quality start and the first-ever effort with at least six strikeouts, no walks and no runs in a World Series clincher.
• DH Jorge Soler: 1-for-3, 1 HR, 2 R, 3 RBI. Statcast measured his blast at 109.6 mph off the bat and 446 feet. “Crushed,” in other words. Not to be overlooked, he also came home on Freddie Freeman’s RBI double in the fifth.
• SS Dansby Swanson: 1-for-4, 1 HR, 1 R, 2 RBI. Though Atlanta ultimately didn’t need more than Soler’s home run, it was Swanson’s two-run shot in the fifth that really delivered the message to fans packed into Minute Maid Park that the home team wasn’t going to win this one.
• 1B Freddie Freeman: 2-for-4, 1 2B, 1 HR, 1 R, 2 RBI. If this is to be the last time he ever suits up for Atlanta, what a way to go out. His solo homer in the seventh, in particular, was the obligatory dagger.

Astros Players of the Game

• LF Michael Brantley: 2-for-4. He was the only Astro with more than one hit in Game 6, not to mention their only regular to hit over .300 for the series.

Seriously, Atlanta’s Championship Is Historically Unlikely

Though history will show that Atlanta won its first World Series title in 25 years on November 2, 2021, arguably the defining date of the team’s season is actually August 6. 

It was on that day (a Friday, if you must know) that manager Brian Snitker’s team achieved a winning record for the first time. Until now, no World Series winner had ever first crossed the .500 threshold so late in a season:

Even in the wake of three straight National League East titles and a trip to the National League Championship Series in 2020, that Atlanta would end up having a difficult season in 2021 wasn’t entirely unforeseen. If anything, the club’s trajectory during the summer was vindication for projection systems that had it pegged for 80-ish wins during the spring.

What neither computers nor people could have anticipated, however, was exactly how Atlanta would come so close to total ruin.

The word “blah” might best describe Atlanta’s early months. There was just nothing of note there as it went 38-41 through June. Yet it wasn’t until July 10 that Atlanta truly hit its nadir. That was when Acuna, who had been putting up MVP-caliber numbers, tore the ACL in his right knee and was lost for the season.

Eric Espada/Getty Images

Atlanta was already without Ozuna, who didn’t play out the rest of the first season of his newly signed four-year, $64 million deal after his arrest on domestic violence charges in May. Travis d’Arnaud was also out of the picture because of thumb surgery. Though he was able to pitch in spring training, young ace Mike Soroka wasn’t yet fully recovered from an Achilles tear that he ultimately aggravated in June.

Just how screwed was Atlanta after Acuna’s injury compounded things? Very screwed. As in, about a 7 percent chance of making the playoffs screwed. That screwed.

Which is to say, Atlanta beat expectations just by going 44-29 in the 73 games it played after Acuna’s injury.

As they simply had to, it was the club’s incumbent stars who picked up the bulk of the slack. The loss of Acuna coincided with Freeman and Austin Riley getting red-hot to the tune of a combined .947 OPS and 31 homers. Swanson and Ozzie Albies pitched in 29 homers of their own, while Morton and Fried shoved with a 2.35 ERA in 29 total starts.

And yet the single biggest contribution to Atlanta’s season-salvaging stretch run came from on high. Because even though his team went just 7-9 in the first 16 games following Acuna’s injury, general manager Alex Anthopoulos still fortified his offense with deals for Soler, Duvall, Rosario and Pederson ahead of the July 30 trade deadline.

“I was ecstatic,” Anthopoulos said, per MLB.com’s Mark Bowman, recalling the go-ahead from team chairman Terry McGuirk to add to the team’s payroll. “That’s a credit to those fans who came out and supported this club and put us in this position.”

Those moves? Yeah, they paid off. All those four new outfielders did was team up for an .830 OPS and 41 home runs.

As they hit more than all but one team in the National League, home runs were indeed a feature for Atlanta after the trade deadline came and went. So was excellent defense, as the team’s newfound fondness for shifts eventually led it to allowing the league’s second-lowest batting average on balls in play after the deadline.

It was also during this stretch that Atlanta’s famed “Night Shift” of relievers first clocked in. Atlanta’s whole bullpen excelled with a 3.23 ERA after July 30, but driving the bus was the foursome of Smith, A.J. Minter, Tyler Matzek and Luke Jackson. Together, they carved up the opposition by way of a 2.27 ERA in 100 total appearances.

Perhaps there’s an alternate timeline in which Atlanta’s strong finish to 2021 goes for naught because the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies were simply better. But in this timeline, Snitker’s guys effectively ran unopposed in the season’s final weeks:

Yet even after Atlanta had secured its fourth straight NL East title, the writing on the wall still said that a deep postseason run was unlikely. It had finished the regular season with only 88 wins and .547 winning percentage. Throughout all of MLB history, only four other clubs had ever won the World Series after falling short of a .550 winning percentage in the regular season.

Looking back now, it’s still easy to spot moments when the writing on the wall was less than optimistic for Atlanta during the playoffs.

For instance, after a 2-1 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 1 of the NLDS. And then when Soler had to go on the COVID-19 injured list before that series ended. The 106-win Los Angeles Dodgers proved to be a relative pushover in the NLCS, but then Atlanta’s win in Game 1 of the World Series was undercut by Morton’s broken leg.

And yet, here is Atlanta on November 2. Champion of the baseball world. And all it had to do to get there was…well, what it had already been doing.

As great as the Astros offense was in its own right, it decisively lost the home run battle to Atlanta in the World Series by a final tally of 11-2. That made it 23 homers for Atlanta in the playoffs, the most of any team. Freeman, the reigning NL MVP, produced five of those, with another 12 coming from the team’s four newest outfielders.

Defensively, getting a ground ball through Atlanta’s infield was close to impossible throughout the playoffs. The foursome of Freeman, Albies, Swanson and Riley allowed just a .215 average on grounders, albeit with a slight rise in the World Series…all the way to .217.

As was the case for every other manager, Snitker had a hard time getting innings from his starters during the postseason. He was, however, handsomely rewarded for how much trust he put in the “Night Shift,” and specifically in Smith, Minter and Matzek:

• Smith: 11.0 IP, 5 H, 3 BB, 0 R, 8 K
• Minter: 12.0 IP, 8 H, 4 BB, 4 R, 18 K
• Matzek: 15.2 IP, 10 H, 4 BB, 3 R, 24 K

These numbers will live forever alongside the gold-encrusted “World Series Champions” on the Baseball Reference page for Atlanta’s 2021 season. Yet they won’t tell the whole story, which will inevitably become confined to fading memories and increasingly obscure pieces of text and video.

What Smith, though, would have everyone remember about this Atlanta team is that it wasn’t just a collection of guys who played well together. They were a team in every sense of what the word should mean:

Come 2022, this roster will surely look different. Though Morton and d’Arnaud signed contract extensions, the open market is set to call Freeman, Soler and Rosario. Especially given how they performed down the stretch, the interest in them in places other than Atlanta could be strong enough to lure each of them away.

For now, though, this is a matter for another day. What matters today is that the Commissioner’s Trophy is in Atlanta’s hands. And that, after all the team went through, the feeling couldn’t possibly be better.

For parting words, it seems only right to use Freeman’s: “Everything was thrown at us, and we overcame it. That’s absolutely incredible to me.”

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, Baseball Savant and MLB.com.