At approximately 9:30 this evening the Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants will begin their National League Division Series inside the Giants’ AT&T Park.
After watching Philadelphia’s Roy Halladay no-hit Cincinnati – the NL’s best-hitting team during the regular season – on Wednesday you kind of wonder why they’re even playing. Why not just slot the Phillies straight into the World Series?
Because neither the Braves nor the Giants are going to deny Philadelphia a third straight trip to the Fall Classic. The Phillies are the new Big Red Machine, only with much better pitching than those old Cincy monsters. Or, if you prefer, they’re the 1990s Braves with better hitting and a more reliable closer.
Either way, unless the Yankees can go buy another couple of All-Stars between now and the Series, the Phillies should throw their second parade in three seasons.
Nevertheless, before any of that can occur the rules state that Philly must beat someone in the NLCS, so I’m going to go really, really, really far out on a limb here and pick the Braves. In four games.
I’m doing this mostly because the Georgia Lapdogs football team has brought enough misery to the Peach State this autumn. These are tough times we’re in. Poverty. Drought. Another round of negative campaign ads to endure.
No state should bear the brunt of too much athletic disappointment, though the Titans, Vols, Commodores, Memphis Tigers and Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders seem determined to force Governor Bredesen to order massive dumping of Prozac into our drinking water to avoid a catastrophic statewide epidemic of can’t-get-out-of-bed blues.
Not in Georgia, though. Not when the Braves are sending Derek Lowe to the mound tonight to face a Giants team that he has a 5-1 record and 1.98 ERA against in eight career starts at AT&T Park.
By the way, that’s also the same Lowe who won all five of his September starts thanks to a 1.17 ERA.
Yes, the Giants had a collective 1.78 ERA in September, the best by any staff in more than four decades. But most of that came against the NL West, which produced three of the NL’s bottom seven batting averages and not a single team among the league’s top seven.
Moreover, Atlanta not only won the season series from the Giants, 4-3, but led them in every meaningful category for those seven contests.
Of course, these are also the Hunt for Red-eyed October Braves, the gusy who never seem to live up to their promise come autumn. But this is also an atypical Braves team in that it has sort of winked at pressure and expectations all season long.
Knowing this was Bobby Cox’s last go around, knowing there would be no Chipper Jones around to save them down the stretch, they nevertheless won the ones they had to win to reach the postseason for the first time since 2005. In many ways there appears to be the same storybook aura surrounding these guys that enveloped that first NL championship squad in 1991.
Admittedly, much rides on tonight. Let Lowe lose what should be a spectacular pitching duel against the two-time reigning Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum and the Braves are automatically in trouble, since Lincecum would almost certainly pitch a game 5, if necessary.
But let the Braves win and that major league-best 56-25 home record could suddenly become a huge security blanket for the Sunday and, if necessary, Monday games in the Big Peach.
Beyond that, Atlanta has almost always previously been the hunted come the playoffs. This time they needed a near miracle just to get here, this being the only wildcard berth of Cox’s 15 playoff bids with the Braves.
Said Atlanta pitcher Tim Hudson, who is scheduled to start the Sunday contest, “It’s kind of our nature, better late than never.”
Now if the Braves could just get the football Dawgs to embrace that same philosophy, Mark Richt might yet have as long a coaching career at Cox.