By Bud L. Ellis
SOMEWHERE IN NORTH GEORGIA – They only lost three games in a row once in the regular season. They held an early lead in the decisive game of the National League Championship Series. They extinguished a 19-year playoff drought, and came agonizingly close to going to the World Series for the first time since the previous century.
In the end, the Atlanta Braves simultaneously announced their arrival as a legitimate world championship contender and learned that even the smallest mistakes at the highest level of baseball can prove fatal to one’s title hopes.
The Braves couldn’t close the door on this NLCS, losing three games in a row after building a 3-1 series advantage. The final nail was hammered shut by Cody Bellinger’s tiebreaking seventh-inning homer off Chris Martin, lifting the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 4-3 victory Sunday in Game 7 and a 4-3 victory in the series, and ending the most successful season by the Braves since the 1999 edition captured the pennant.
There will be no World Series appearance for the Braves this season, a season nobody knew would even happen due to the pandemic. It was a 60-game sprint to an expanded playoffs where, once there, the Braves swept the Reds and Marlins to reach the NLCS against a Los Angeles franchise making its fifth consecutive LCS appearance.
And while plenty went right for the Braves in the seven-game series, the missed opportunities in the final three games undoubtedly will stay with them for the months to come. A bit too many quiet offensive innings, a couple of costly baserunning mistakes.
Consider it a lesson learned, as much as it hurts.
Let there be no doubt: It hurts. Badly.
“It’s an unbelievable experience for a really young team,” Braves manager Brian Snitker – whose lineup in Game 7 included five players age 26 or younger – told reporters postgame. “We made some mistakes. We shot ourselves in the foot.
“In games like this, runs are so hard to come by.”
The Braves got on the board in the top of the first in Game 7, a Marcell Ozuna chasing home Ronald Acuna Jr. for the game’s first run. Dansby Swanson belted a long homer in the second and Atlanta led 2-0. After the Dodgers tied it with two runs in the third on a Will Smith single, the Braves answered with an Austin Riley single to recapture the lead.
Then came one of those moments everybody will remember, and not pleasantly.
With runners on second and third and no outs, Nick Markakis hit a chopper to third. Swanson broke from third and found himself in a rundown, being tagged out running toward the plate. Riley, who was on second, tried to take third and was cut down, a double play on a ball hit 75 feet short-circuiting what could have been a huge inning.
Seventeen Atlanta hitters would step into the batter’s box after; one reached, an Ozzie Albies walk in the sixth.
Meanwhile, the Braves were dodging Dodgers threats left and right on the mound. They ran out of magic in the sixth. Shane Greene needed just 14 pitches to get through the fifth, but Snitker elected to go with A.J. Minter – who threw 42 pitches in starting Game 5 on Friday – to begin the sixth. The Dodgers countered with pinch-hitter Kiki Hernandez, who destroyed a 2-2 pitch to left-center to even the score at 3.
In the seventh, Chris Martin got the first two outs quickly. He made a mistake over the plate to Bellinger, and the former MVP smashed it deep into the right-field seats for the Dodgers first lead of the game. It was the only lead they needed to win the pennant, Austin Riley flying out to Bellinger in center at 11:52 p.m. ET to extinguish Atlanta’s World Series dream one win short.
Hernandez fouled off three pitches with two strikes before his homer; Bellinger did the same. Even down 3-1 in the series, the Los Angeles offense grinded out quality at-bat after quality at-bat against the Braves, whose vaunted bullpen finally ran out of gas after helping carry the team to the verge of the Fall Classic.
It’s a tough ending for a team that not many thought had a shot to get here. There will be plenty of second guessing and what ifs asked in the days and weeks to come. Rightly so. But at the same time, allowing that to diminish what Atlanta accomplished in 2020 is a bit short-sighted.
These Braves were so much fun to watch, at a time in our history when we all needed something to rally around and look forward to other than hospitalization numbers and unemployment figures. It’s incredibly disappointing to fall one run short of the World Series, no matter the environment surrounding the moment, but there is a bit of solace even as the Dodgers begin their celebration.
For one, the Braves overcame so much just to get here. We don’t need to go chapter-and-verse into the injuries and underperformance. It’s a testament to their toughness. While we can and should point to the lack of execution in several key moments the past 48 hours, nobody can say this bunch didn’t try everything they could to push this ride into the final week of October.
The biggest takeaway is the progress made from last season to now. While the end comes with the subtleness of running straight into a concrete wall – it always feels like that, doesn’t it? – this also feels like a continuation of this group’s growth. The experience of getting to this stage can’t be overstated. The expectations should continue to rise, and rightly so.
With a young core in place, this figures not to be the only deep October push. And perhaps one October in the near future, it will be the Braves playing in the World Series, winning the championship the franchise has chased for a quarter-century. At this moment, the future is as bright as ever.
Even if in the present it’s hard to see the light, through the tears and pain of a journey stopped just short.
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Bud L. Ellis is a lifelong Braves fan who worked as a sports writer for daily newspapers throughout Georgia earlier in his writing career, with duties including covering the Atlanta Braves, the World Series and MLB’s All-Star Game. Ellis currently lives in the Atlanta suburbs and contributes his thoughts on Braves baseball and MLB for a variety of outlets. Reach him on Twitter at @bud006.
