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| Monday, May 26 Updated: May 28, 10:02 AM ET The Braves' ongoing dynasty By Jim Baker ESPN Insider |
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ATLANTA -- They line the façade in left field in Turner Field: oversized pennants that indicate the team's success. In a modern stadium overcrowded with advertising and bits of physical business, they might not be the most dominant feature and it can be argued that they are not aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, what they represent is impressive although experiencing it day-to-day as we all have makes it is sometimes easy to forget that.
To do what the Braves have done since 1991 is not unique in baseball history -- but it is nearly so. Take a 13-year chunk out of any number of intervals in the Yankee timeline and you'll find better winning percentages I stopped counting at 10, but 1931-1943 (.641) was the best and 1927-1939 second-best (.639). Postwar, it's 1949-61 at .628. Apart from teams who played both in New York and the American League, what the Braves have done since their surprise '91 season is very nearly the best ever:
1901-1913 Pittsburgh Pirates: .618 Given that, here is a review of the Baker's dozen of Braves seasons in this fantastic run:
1991
Best pitcher: Tom Glavine
Stealing the thunder of the Braves rise was the fact that they met a team in the World Series that had also gone from last place to first and lost to them. The Minnesota Twins may have out-Cinderellaed the Braves for that one season, but, in context, what they did was less dramatic. For one thing, they had been nine games better than the Braves the previous season and had averaged 85 wins a year to the Braves 62 in the three seasons before that -- so they weren't so much climbing out of the muck as they were experiencing a correction. For another, they enjoyed one more decent season before heading into a decade-long funk from which they have only just emerged. The Twins got the trophy and their fans got the insta-thrill; the Braves and their fans got security. You can argue which one is more desirable.
1992
Best pitcher: Tom Glavine or John Smoltz If you were to pick the one person in baseball history who had a sound reason for uttering the words, "... I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth," chances are it wouldn't be Lou Gehrig. My vote for the man who should have that carved on his tombstone would have to go to Rafael Belliard. After all or part of nine seasons with the Pirates in which he never came close to slugging .300 or getting on base 30 percent of the time, Belliard came to the Braves. He had, essentially a career-year in 1991 -- somehow without breaking the .300 mark in either category again -- and then hung around for the next seven years as part of the best program in baseball. Apart from '91, his contributions were negligible -- especially in October. In his defense, he did bunch some hits to produce good lines for the '91 Series and the '96 NLCS, but, overall, he managed one extra-base hit in 81 postseason plate appearances.
1993
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux Borrowing a technique from Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Lineups, here are the best seasons enjoyed by Braves players during the 13-year run. The weakest position so far has been second base although Marcus Giles is on the verge of changing all that this year. Braves best individual seasons, 1991-2002
LH SP: Tom Glavine, 1998: 20-6, 2.47 ERA, Cy Young
(his '91 is close) At third base, a case can be made for Terry Pendelton's 1992 season over Jones' '99 effort because Pendleton won the Gold Glove and Jones played third base so well they made him a left fielder. I am a prisoner of his gaudy offensive numbers, though, and chose Jones.
1994
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux There are those who will argue that, had the season been allowed to continue, the Braves would have surely caught the upstart Expos and filled in the one gap on their 1990s first-place resume. To that I say, "Sorry, what is done is done. Little Timmy fell down the well and Lassie never made it back home to alert June Lockhart." It's over. It happened. It's in the books. We'll just never know ... That it remains the sole blemish on their record is befitting a season that is a blemish on baseball's overall record.
1995
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux Critics of the Braves like to point to their lone World Championship -- won this season in six games against the Indians -- as proof that what they have achieved since 1991 is something less than special. Would it be more impressive if they'd knocked down a couple more big trophies like the Yankees have? Yes, but we shouldn't let that bother us when it comes to evaluating their accomplishments. Do inferior teams beat superior teams in the playoffs? Yes, all the time. It's part of baseball and it is why I do not wish to see the playoffs expanded any further than they already have been. To do so would be to further discount the effort required to excel over the course of six months and 162 games.
1996
Best pitcher: John Smoltz
A yearly feature of the early portion of the dynasty were the postseason heroics of Mark Lemke. While he might go a month without doing anything even worth considering for a SportsCenter highlight during the regular season, once the playoffs began, Lemke was usually found ramming a ball on a hop against the outfield wall. He was a poor man's Mr. October -- or so it seemed. As it so often happens in these instances, we tend to remember the highlights and forget the big picture. Over the course of 200-plus postseason at bats, Lemke got much closer to his true self than we tend to remember him doing. By the time he was done, his postseason career OPS fairly resembled that of the regular season, .685 to .641. (As an aside, I wish Lemke's post-career experiment with learning the knuckle ball had worked out. If it had, he'd still be pitching.)
1997
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux Watching Glavine's return to Turner Field on Saturday, the polarized reaction of those around me was striking. What is the right thing to do in this case? Do you cheer because this man has contributed so mightily to what has transpired over the last dozen years or do you boo out of frustration that he is no longer on hand to continue doing so? Or, do you boo because your local franchise has shown repeatedly that it is capable of stepping over such bodies and leaving the crime scene scott-free and you want him to know that the team will succeed without him? What we saw was a mixture of all those reactions. According to the Bill James Win Shares system, Glavine has contributed the second-most to the success of the Braves during this run. Here are the eight men who have logged at least 100 Win Shares in that time:
Greg Maddux
1998
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux or Tom Glavine The issue of multiple divisions and the fact that playing in that format affords a club much more opportunity to win something should not be discounted when comparing the modern Braves to great long-term dynasties of the past. Yes, it is easier to top out on a small group that it is on a larger one. The Braves have topped out on five other teams three times (1991-1993) and four other teams eight times (1995-2002) while the Yankees in their great runs were mostly up against seven other clubs with nine coming at the very end (1961-64) of their era of good fortune. It would be possible in this context to get by with records that are just good enough to win the division, but not dominate the league over the long term. This is not the case with the Braves, however. Taking the record of the next-best team (or best team in the season in which Atlanta did not have the best record) and combining them, they still do not have a better record than the Braves (.611), even at the .602 clip at which they played.
1999
Best pitcher: Kevin Millwood Naturally, the Braves have hauled in some hardware in this time period. There have been the multiple Gold Gloves of Maddux and Andruw Jones, and singles for Pendleton and Grissom; the six straight (and seven of eight) Cy Young Awards for Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz, the MVP trophies for Pendleton (albeit undeserved) and Chipper Jones and the Rookie of the Year Award for Rafael Furcal. In addition, Smoltz was last year's Rolaids Relief winner and Bobby Cox was Manager of the Year in 1991, proving that if you're going to win that award, it pays to surprise. Here are the Braves best seasons in various categories during the run:
Batting Average: .333, Kenny Lofton, 1997
ERA: 1.54, Greg Maddux, 1994
2000
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux A run like this is bound to produce some Hall of Fame wattage. Here are the Braves candidates from the 1991-2003 period: Locks: Maddux, Glavine, Bobby Cox. At some point, the Hall of Fame voters are probably going to have to address GM John Schuerholz's role in all of this as well. Working on it: The Joneses. Had Chipper stayed at third base his path to Cooperstown would be wide open, regardless of his defense. Now that he's spending the rest of his life elsewhere, it's not quite so apparent, but it still looks like a good bet. As he plays into his 30s it would behoove him to continue to keep missing fewer than five games per season as he has so far. That will certainly help him pile up the counting stats. With Andruw, if you think of what has happened so far as a mere prelude, then the best is yet to come and he'll make the Hall with room to spare. If he does not jump a peg and instead continues on exactly as he has so far for another 10 years (he's only 26), isn't that still a Hall-worthy career given his defense? A case could me made for: John Smoltz and Fred McGriff. Smoltz is a long shot whose candidacy is predicated on two things: three more years of lights-out closing and how seriously the candidacy of his predecessor down this path -- Dennis Eckersley -- is taken. When the time comes for McGriff to face the voters, we will see more words written on the topic than were expended on the recently-completed conflict in Iraq. Regardless of the outcome, the Hall will find itself with some sort of new threshold for induction. (As an aside, we have to consider the possibility that Gary Sheffield will finish his career with some numbers that we have always equated with Hall of Famers.)
2001
Best pitcher: Greg Maddux For 12-plus seasons, the Braves have outscored their opponents by almost one run per game on average. For the past seven seasons they have not closed the door on the sale at the end of the season. I've already addressed this, but it bears revisiting since so many of these wonderful Braves seasons end in what some regard as "failure." Michael Lewis addresses the regular season/postseason phenomenon in general terms in his marvelous book Moneyball, but it applies in specific to the Braves as well. Writes Lewis, "The playoffs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem ... In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time ... The baseball season is structured to mock reason."
2002
Best pitcher: Pick 'em: Maddux, Millwood, Glavine or
Smoltz Seeing Braves fans do The Chop at this late date is kind of amusing. When the run began 12 years ago and the nation was treated to one of the great political conundrums of our time -- that being the sight of Jane Fonda doing a faux rendition of a make-believe Native American activity -- The Chop was part of the whole neo-Bravo thing. Now, though, it plays more like something you'd see in a historic re-enactment -- an action that's lost its relevance, but still needs to be done to guarantee authenticity.
2003
Best pitcher: John Smoltz Is all this premature? Is celebrating 13 straight years of success while still fairly early in the 13th year jumping the love gun a bit? Sure! But do you want to bet the Braves are not going to win their division again at this juncture? Maybe that's the smart way to approach these Braves from now on: don't bet on them to lose the division until they actually do lose the division. Jim Baker writes Monday through Friday for ESPN Insider. |
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