If you wait long enough in professional sports, everything that goes around comes back around. The Green Bay Packers earned their third Super Bowl win at the close of the 1996 season, 29 years after they claimed their second. The Boston Celtics won their 17th NBA title in 2008, 22 years after No. 16.
Unfortunately for the Atlanta Braves, when their 51st season representing the Big Peach begins Monday afternoon against the Washington Nationals at Turner Field, they look far more likely to duplicate 1990's 65-97 season than 1991's 94-68 National League championship run.
But former Braves player and current broadcaster Brian Jordan believes the franchise will return soon to its past glory days, when the team won 14 straight division crowns, reached five total World Series in nine years and won it all in 1995.
"If you go back to 1990, just before the Braves started winning championships, they had the No. 1 farm system in all of baseball," Jordan said during a speaking engagement in Chattanooga a few weeks ago. "That went away under previous management. But it's back now. The farm system is No. 1 again, and I think the big-league Braves won't be far behind."
Indeed, from Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine to future Hall of Fame player Chipper Jones, Atlanta became the envy of baseball throughout the 1990s for its homegrown champions. But as the farm system dipped in recent years under the leadership of former general manager Frank Wren, so did the product on the field.
The Braves haven't won a single playoff series since 2001, and that divisional win led to a 4-1 NLCS loss to the eventual World Series champion Arizona Diamondbacks. Beyond that, the last two seasons have produced losing records, including last year's 67-95 stinker.
Because of that, the most consistent prediction beyond a third straight losing season for the final summer of Braves baseball at Turner Field is that manager Fredi Gonzalez's sixth year in the dugout will be his last. When the Braves begin the 2017 season at SunTrust Park, the team almost assuredly will bring a new skipper to its new playpen.
But there's still this season to play, even as futile an exercise as that seems. There's a long, hot summer to say a bitter goodbye to the Ted, which remains far too good a ballpark to exit after just 20 years of service, even if its $3.50 hot dogs and $2.75 small colas still boggle the mind (at least until SunTrust decides to double those prices).
So what to expect of this season, beginning Monday against the Nats?
"I think the Braves are going to be better than a lot of people think," said Jordan, though that might mean winning no more than 70 games rather than the 65 or 66 most folks think. "It's all going to come down to these young pitchers, and how they handle major league hitting."
USA Today doesn't believe the Braves will top 67-95, though that's better than the newspaper giant's prediction for NL East brother Philadelphia (61-101). Virtually all news outlets have Atlanta in that 65-to-68 win range.
But that doesn't mean they couldn't be better than that if young pitchers such as Mike Foltynewicz, Matt Wisler, John Gant and opening day starter Julio Teheran, who just turned 25, continue to develop.
Though Foltynewicz will begin the season in Class AAA due to offseason surgery, he's expected to be in Atlanta by the first of May, where Braves Nation can expect the front office to bring him and the rest of the franchise's young guns along at an astutely cautious pace.
"We have guys who are close and have real high upside," Braves general manager John Coppolella said last week on MLB.com. "You see the light go on eventually, but it takes different people time to reach that level of comfort, and I think we've seen that this year with Foltynewicz and Wisler."
Take away Freddie Freeman on offense and it's also hard to see this team scoring enough to runs to leave any pitching staff save last year's Mets or that 1990s Braves bunch capable of posting victories. This isn't to say that acquiring a true leadoff hitter and superb center fielder in Ender Inciarte won't scare some foes. Or that catcher A.J. Pierzynski, right fielder Nick Markakis and shortstop Erick Aybar can't score a few runs. And regardless of what he does on the field, it's nice to have Atlanta's own Jeff Francoeur back on the roster, if only to recall the beginning of the end of the greatest regular-season dynasty in MLB history.
But almost all good things end in sports before they cycle back to become good again. There are some people who are convinced the Chicago Cubs are on their way to their first World Series appearance since 1945 and their first world championship since 1908.
So perhaps this last season in Turner Field will be the last year of 90 or more losses. Maybe team president John Hart and GM Coppolella can rebuild the Braves in the way that former GM John Schuerholz and manager Bobby Cox once did, especially since Schuerholz remains in a key advisory role to longtime buddy Hart.
Yet at this point there seems to be much more focus on the new park than the new players. Or as Schuerholz recently said of SunTrust Park: "It's the newest, most modern, most beautiful park in all of major league baseball."
Braves Nation can only hope the major league team that will one day call that park its home eventually learns how to play the game beautifully enough to entice its fans to marvel at more than the new facility's steel, brick and mortar.
Perhaps that's also why a friend of mine recently observed after reading that Chipper Jones is selling his vast west Texas hunting ranch: "At the rate they're going, the only way the Braves will sell out that new stadium is if they bring Chipper back as manager."
Too bad the only thing that would seem to save this season would be Turner Field lowering its hot dogs and colas to $1 each.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com