Dear Atlanta Braves,
Congrats on
a good season! Sure, you didn’t get to 90 wins – your 88 was the fewest of any
of the 10 playoff teams – but you made it to the NLCS! And boy, what a start!
Two walk-offs and then a late collapse, followed by a convincing victory to
move one win away from the World Series? No one remembers that win total now.
But here’s
the deal: EVERYONE remembers the Dodgers’ win total. And the fact that, at 18
wins BETTER than you, they had to survive the Wild Card game. And a best-of-5
series against the team with the most wins in the game. Everyone also remembers
last year the same lead in your hands, against the same team, in the same round
of the postseason. And you flopped. Allowed the Hated Dodgers to comeback, take
three straight, and then waltz by a Blake Snell-less Tampa Bay Rays late in
Game 6 of the 2020 World Series (looking at you, Rays analytics
department) and throw us into this nearly year-long national nightmare.
As you might
have guessed by now, I’m a Giants fan. The Braves have made life rough for my type
for quite some time, starting with the 1914 “Miracle” Boston Braves coming back
from the dead in July. My first year as a dedicated fan of the Orange and Black
was 1993, a set of numbers still cursed by fans by the Bay (though the blame
goes more to the San Diego Padres for giving Fred McGriff to you for three nobodies,
and the Colorado Rockies for falling on their faces in your presence – who goes
0-13 against a division opponent in a season? – and we’ll add whomever made the
decision to put Atlanta, the large city in Georgia, which is on the East Coast,
in the National League…West). And then last year, when you blew the advantage
of needing just one more win to eliminate Los Angeles.
It had been
nice to end any argument with a Dodgers fan with a simple “three-in-five!” for
the past half-decade, and then really tick ‘em off by mentioning “1988”. But
that’s all out the window now after they took the “piece of metal” – er, Commissioner’s
Trophy – following your NLCS debacle last year. Yeah, we could have done it
ourselves, but you know how baseball goes. So, how about throwing your
(temporary) west-coast fan base a bone and taking one of the next two games?
The sooner, the better, in fact. Let’s not leave it to the final game – we Giants
fans know how that turned out. And, hey, a bonus for you: if you win,
especially soon, it improves your odds of a World Series title! Doesn’t that sound
appealing?
Let’s
try some of that. Just one win. K thx!
