ATLANTA – The Atlanta Braves remember what happened last October and want to avoid a repeat. The Los Angeles Dodgers plan on an encore.
Atlanta held 2-0 and 3-1 leads in the 2020 National League Championship Series before the Dodgers won three consecutive games to take the best-of-seven set, then moved on to beat the Tampa Bay Rays for their first World Series title since 1988.
The Braves won the first two games of this year’s NLCS last weekend, but then the Dodgers took two of three in Los Angeles, forcing a Game 6 back at Atlanta’s Truist Park on Saturday night. The Braves are still just one win from their first World Series appearance since 1999, and they’ll have two chances in Atlanta to get that needed victory, with Game 7, if necessary, on Sunday night.
The Dodgers must win out to advance to what would be their fourth trip to the Fall Classic in a five-year span, but they have survived seven consecutive elimination games dating to last year. And although Atlanta’s fourth straight NL East Division title brought it home-field advantage in the NLCS this year as the higher seed, the wild-card Dodgers won 18 more regular-season games than the Braves and took four of six against them during the regular season.
Then there’s the matter of what happened last fall.