By: William Robinson
At the beginning of the 2021 season, I had so foolishly predicted that my Atlanta Braves to be the World Series champions at season’s end. However, at that time I was expecting an MVP season from our top 5 player in baseball Ronald Acuna Jr. A stellar pitching season from Mike Soroka and contributions from Marcell Ozuna and others. If you were to tell me then that my prediction would be correct but that Acuna would be injured by mid-season, Soroka would never take the field for this team and that Ozuna would be arrested and wouldn’t finish the season I would have called you crazy. However, here we are on November 6th and my Atlanta Braves are the World Series champions.
The only other time in my life the team that I cheered for won the World Series was back when I lived in Kentucky and my Cincinnati Reds took the title in 1990 going wire to wire. This was not that team. This Atlanta team struggled through much of the season. Acuna was having an MVP caliber season but on July 10th he tore his ACL and would be out the rest of the season. The Atlanta Braves were under .500 part of the way through August! Honestly, I thought that the Braves should consider selling at the trade deadline. They didn’t sell though. Instead, they pulled off the biggest heist that I have ever seen in baseball by acquiring Joc Pederson, Eddie Rosario, Jorge Soler and Adam Duvall for basically a bag of peanuts.
I haven’t been that big of a fan of Alex Anthopolous in his time in Atlanta. I had criticized him for his unwillingness to trade prospects, and to be fair he didn’t trade prospects in those deals either. The best player that they traded was Bryce Wilson. Bryce Wilson who has a career WAR of -.2. They also traded Pablo Sandoval (a player who the Braves were going to cut anyways), and Bryce Ball who they once had high hopes for but during this season became an overweight big player who couldn’t hit home runs. By trading that bag of peanuts, they were able to acquire the personality for the team the second half of the season, the ALCS MVP, and the World Series MVP. I would be remiss if I didn’t give a huge chunk of the success for this season to Anthopolous and his robbery of other MLB owners.
Another big chunk of the success of this team is the management of Brian Snitker. Having been a long-time member of the Braves staff, Snitker was able to guide this team though a season with a firm steady hand. This team could have easily collapsed anytime. However, they stayed in the fight, and sometimes that’s the key to winning is just staying in. They stayed in and when the time was right, they got extremely hot. They only lost 7 games out of their last 30 on their way to the championship and beat two amazing teams in the Dodgers and Astros. Snitker took home grown talent in Freeman, Swanson, Albies, Riley, Faried, and Anderson not to mention Minter, and Jackson and Matzek and turned them into a champion.
I’m honestly not sure what to write about this team that our local media hasn’t already said ad nauseum to this point. So, to me I’ll write about the things that I enjoyed the most about this season. I enjoyed Freddie Freeman with his huge smiles and his true joy of playing baseball, being an amazing father and true role model and I love seeing him finally get his due for being one of the best in the game and a future hall of famer. I enjoyed the bullpen (the night shift) and how early on in the season we all would sit on our hands any time that they would come into the game, but by the end of the season Will Smith was amazing. I enjoyed Dansby Swanson, one of my favorite players hitting a no doubt home run in the clinching world series game and then after the game was over talking about what it meant for him to be from Atlanta. I enjoyed the jubilation of Jorge Soler after Swanson’s home run and then him hitting one out of the stadium. I enjoyed Joc Pederson and his bravado. I mean who else could play in pearls? I enjoyed the breakout seasons of Austin Riley and Ian Anderson. But most of all I enjoyed being a fan.
This season is one that will always hold a place in my heart. Thank you to the Atlanta Braves for being the team that you are this season and I look forward to seeing where we go from here.