After I Wrote a Braves Article, the Dodgers Made me Eat My Words. Is Another Atlanta Choke Inevitable?

They say the cream always rises, and in baseball, the money does too. $275 million means that this series is a long way from over. And sadly, Atlanta fans have seen this movie before.

Will the Braves do the unthinkable and blow a 3-1 lead in the NLCS back-to-back years? Say it ain’t so, Atlanta. Say it ain’t so.

After Thursday’s 11-2 shellacking of Max Fried and Co., the Dodgers know they can fly east and take two games in Georgia. And the Braves know it too.

There are several reasons why I believe this is going 7 games. For one, I can’t see the Dodgers ending the 2021 playoffs with a losing record. Even if they falter in Game 7, they will finish the postseason at a respectable 7-6, even if their fans don’t consider them falling short of a title “respectable” in any way. I also can’t see the Dodgers losing three straight Max Scherzer starts, and failing to win consecutive games in this series. Also, will LA really go 0-3 in Atlanta in this series? That doesn’t seem likely either.

But beyond the apparent minutia lies a much, much bigger problem: the city of Atlanta. All I can do is sigh as I write this, but it’s almost unfathomable that the city has won just ONE title since professional sports arrived there in 1966. The Braves won the 1995 World Series, but the list of heartaches that Atlanta has given its fans is longer than a CVS receipt.

We all know what happened last year to the Braves. In the bubble they blasted LA, 10-2, in Game 4 to go up 3-1 in the series, similar to their 9-2 win last night to go up 3-1 this time around. But the bats went mostly silent in the last three games, scoring just seven runs, and the city’s ledger was given yet another black mark. Most infamously, the Falcons still hold the NFL records for biggest blown lead in a Super Bowl (25 points) and an NFC championship game (17 points). 13 times in their history, the Falcons have squandered leads of 16 points or more; 11 of those have occurred in the past two decades alone.

Blowing a 25-point Super Bowl lead crushed the souls of Atlanta fans, but it’s far from the first time. The Braves also blew a 2-0 lead in the 1996 World Series when trying to defend their only title. What made that more heartbreaking was the fact that they won the first two games in convincing fashion at Yankee Stadium by a combined 16-1 score. They went on to lose four straight, enabling the beginning of a Yankees dynasty that saw the Bombers again deny the Braves of a title in 1999 (still to this day the Braves’ most recent Fall Classic appearance).

The Hawks have not been as notable for choking, rather making their trademark more about mediocrity than anything else. One failure that comes to mind is the 2015 Hawks, who won 60 games and captured the top seed in the Eastern Conference, only to be swept in the conference finals by the Cleveland LeBrons.

But back to the Braves for a moment. It feels like this is all too good to be true. No Ronald Acuña Jr. No depth in the starting rotation. 88 wins in the regular season, trying to take down the mighty, 106-win, $275 million Dodgers. Homefield advantage helps, but is it really going to be enough to win a seven-game series against a team that is clearly superior?

And you have to wonder about the psyche of this Braves team now. Had last year’s meltdown in the bubble not occurred, perhaps, perhaps we could buy into the “they don’t know any better” narrative about the upstart Braves being too young and dumb to care that they’re in a tussle with the big, bad Dodgers. And to be fair, the Braves did have the fewest wins of any of the ten playoff teams in this year’s field, two fewer than even the Mariners, who finished with one fewer than a Blue Jays team that also narrowly missed the dance.

Oh, yeah, and doesn’t it kind of feel like the Dodgers were just a little spent coming off the San Francisco series more so than feeling like they’ve truly been outplayed in this series? Between flying all the way across the country to play two road games against a rested team and likely knowing in the back of their minds that falling behind in the series isn’t a deathblow, it seems like the Dodgers are just about to get their sea legs back under them.

If all this plays out the way it feels like it’s going to, then we may need a surge of mental health professionals sent to the greater Atlanta area. Another meltdown this close to the last one may just wreck this Braves regime for the future (unless they can pry about three of the Dodgers’ pending free agents away this offseason). Atlanta sports fans have seen this movie before — at least the beginning of it. Will there finally be a happy ending, or will a Halloween horror show arrive a week early this year?

Either way, everyone in the country may just hear the sounds of Braves fans groaning — or cheering — all the way from Atlanta this weekend.