Golden season or showing golden years? Braves begin

Welcome to the unofficial farewell tour of the most underappreciated dynasty in American professional sports. Or as they’re more popularly known, the Atlanta Braves.

The Braves will comprise one half of major league baseball’s Opening Night game this evening on ESPN when they travel to Washington, D.C., to face the Nationals in their shiny new ballpark. Yes, Boston and Oakland played two games in Japan, but those were morning starts in the United States.

It’s such a big event that President Bush is throwing out the first pitch. Of course, the first day of baseball is worthy of special attention no matter which teams are on the field. Spring has sprung. Everybody’s a contender. Even the Cubs.

And Atlanta could be special all the way through October. Especially if the Brittle Braves — John Smoltz, Mike Hampton and Chipper Jones, to name but three — can play enough games to give the Baby Braves (Brian McCann, Jeff Francoeur and Kelly Johnson, to name three) some solid leadership and support.

This isn’t to say the New York Mega Money Mets aren’t going to win the National League East. The Mets are great bordering on fantastic. But they also seemed that way two years ago and couldn’t hold off the Cardinals in the NLCS.

Sure, they’ve got Johan Santana and Pedro Martinez to throw it and Marlon Anderson, Carlos Beltran and David Wright to hit it. But if the Braves stay healthy and happy and within striking distance entering September, those 14 straight division titles that Atlanta won from 1991 to 2005 could easily become 15 of 17.

Or as Francoeur told MLB.com last week, “Not only do we have the team to make the playoffs, but we also have the pitching to go deep into the playoffs. We haven’t always had that.”

Yet the hunch that the Braves as we’ve known them these past 16 years are almost finished has nothing to do with wins and losses or how far they travel into the postseason.

It has to do with time. Seventeen years worth of time. We’ve witnessed four presidential elections since that magical 1991 summer of going from worst to first. The Internet has become as much a part of most of our lives as flipping on the television. Oil prices have tripled. The national debt has more than doubled. “American Idol” is holding far too many of us hostage.

Through all of that, baseball has had a single constant in its dugouts. His name is Bobby Cox.

Captain Ejection — he set that dubious career record last summer — will turn 67 in May. He moves like he’s 97 and bonds with his players as if he’s 37. And when this season’s over, he will have completed his 49th year in professional baseball in some capacity.

None of this means you have to trumpet Cox as the greatest manager in the history of the game, even if he’ll likely be the only manager or coach in professional sports history ever to win 14 straight division titles.

As with most kissed by genius or greatness or whatever you want to call the gift that helped Cox manage that feat, history is likely to judge him more gloriously than us media types who have forever criticized him for winning only one World Series.

So count the scarcity of world championship rings on his fingers and call him Bobby Bridesmaid if you want. But also appreciate what he’s given us, what all those guys in the classic uniforms highlighted by the politically incorrect tomahawks have provided us over the past 16 summers and this 17th straight opening day.

Remember the five World Series appearances. Fourteen straight years of October baseball from 1991 to 2005. The Cy Youngers: Glavine, Smoltzie and Greg Maddux. Francisco Cabrera driving home Sid Bream in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1992 NLCS. The 1993 NL West stretch run against San Francisco, when Atlanta won 50 of its final 63 games. Chipper and Andruw Jones.

Certainly, logic might dictate that if Cox is up for a 49th season hanging around a lot of guys roughly a third his age, he could coach for a golden 50th a year from now.

But Glavine is already 42 and Smoltz is 40. Chipper turns 36 in April. John Schuerholz is 67 and no longer the general manager, but rather team president.

In many ways, the only guy of note missing is Maddux, who could always resurface, much as Julio Franco kept leaving his retirement village for another pinch-hit at-bat.

Then the farewell tour could become official. Rocking chairs could be given at every road trip, along with keys to the city.

Not that any of them would want that kind of sendoff. They want another championship. All of them.

Said first baseman Mark Teixeira just the other day: “We all have the same goals. We have veterans that want to win again, and we have young guys who want to win for the first time. We’re all on the same page.”

But they are not all at the same stage.

“We are getting older,” Cox told the Atlanta media recently.

They are old enough to know this could be the last roundup for the greatest regular-season dynasty in pro sports history. Whether it should be or not we’ll begin to assess tonight.