BRAVES SUDDENLY BECOME AN OCTOBER FORCE
This Atlanta Braves lineup keeps coming and coming until, as the Miami Marlins learned, you’re swept by a thousand paper cuts and a few machete swings. Make it through Ronald Acuña Jr. and you get Freddie Freeman. Make it through Freeman and you get Marcell Ozuna. Make it through Ozuna and you get Travis d’Arnaud. Put any of them on base, make yourself attack, and now you’re buried by a double off the wall, a bloop single, a Braves homer that, in a blink, sucks the air straight out of your dugout.
That’s how the Braves are rolling through October. That’s how, on Thursday, they advanced to the National League Championship Series for the first time since 2001. Now they’ll face the Dodgers at Globe Life Field in Arlington,
Texas. The Dodgers, not the Braves, are the team to beat in the NL. But Atlanta has a stacked offense, an airtight bullpen and, in their NL Division Series sweep of the Marlins, three young starters who stepped up.
Now that they’ve made their first NLCS in almost two decades, they can rightly eye their first title in 25 years.
“The guys, over the course of this year, they started believing,” said manager Brian Snitker after the Braves advanced. “We put the whole thing together, really. Once we fought that starting pitching bug, to have a couple of these young guys step in and all of a sudden make strides, is really, really good.”
Rotation depth is a lingering question, even after Ian Anderson and Kyle Wright silenced the Marlins. After Mike Soroka tore his right Achilles in early August, stripping the Braves of their
ace, they waited for Cole Hamels to peel himself off the injured list. Then Hamels was shut down, too, and threw just 52 pitches in 2020. Atlanta starters finished the regular season with a 5.51 ERA, the worst in the National League. It was a rea
son — and a compelling one — to doubt how much their offense and bullpen could shoulder.
But Max Fried, Anderson and Wright have eased those concerns. Fried, a 26-yearold lefty, is an NL Cy Young candidate. Anderson, a 22
year-old rookie, has not allowed a run in 112/3 postseason innings. And Wright, 25, threw six scoreless in a 7-0 win over the Marlins on Wednesday. He retired 12 of the last 13 batters he faced. Will their test get tougher against the Dodgers? Yes. Will they need more than three starters in a sevengame series with no off-days? Also yes.
The NLDS still showed that Atlanta has the arms to complement its glowing strengths. As a whole, the staff has allowed five runs across five playoff games, and four of them were shutouts. Wright keyed the most recent one in his postseason debut.
After they beat the Marlins, and Freeman ref lected on the season, he didn’t say much about his preseason coronavirus experience, about how different his summer could have been. He was ready to discuss the historical significance of getting past the NLDS. The rest, he figured, will be unpacked later.
“I’m just glad the narrative is changing from series win, to getting past the division series — there’s not really much to talk about now,” Freeman said. “So we’ll start our own narrative. That’s the great thing about this.”