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 Looks familiar Braves flirting with another postseason collapse
Posted: Friday October 09, 1998 01:39 AM
ATLANTA (AP) -- Here they go again. For the sixth time this decade, Atlanta is threatening to ruin a brilliant regular season with a disheartening postseason. Two more losses, and nobody will remember those 106 regular-season wins. Two more losses, and the Braves can spend all winter wondering what went wrong. Again. The only team to reach the postseason seven times in a row is on the brink of coming up short for the sixth time, having lost the first two games of the NL championship series to the San Diego Padres. "We've never been blown out in any series," Braves pitcher John Smoltz said before Game 2, "but from the way everybody talks, you'd get the feeling we're choke artists." A few hours later, no one's impression had changed. Kevin Brown, who lives 80 miles to the south in Macon, pitched a three-hitter and the Padres blanked the Braves 3-0. Atlanta, hitting .172 as a team, managed only two runs during two dreary days at Turner Field. After leading the NL in fielding, the Braves made three errors and Andres Galarraga botched another grounder Thursday -- it was questionably ruled a hit -- allowing another run to score. "This is not the situation we wanted to be in," said Tom Glavine, the losing pitcher in Game 2. "But by no means is it over." Still, no team has ever lost the first two games at home and come back to win a league championship series since the format switched to best-of-7 in 1985. Now, the Padres have the next three games at rocking, raucous Qualcomm Stadium, where more than 65,000 will try to help write another Braves obituary. Only two San Diego wins will be needed to keep the series from coming back to Turner Field next week. Not that the New Chop Shop has been very intimidating, with more than 8,000 empty seats a night glaring down from the upper deck.
Everyone said the fans of Atlanta were bored with all these postseason appearances. They'll start paying attention when it gets to the World Series, went the party line. Maybe, though, they've just grown weary of watching the Braves come up short year after agonizing year. Since beginning its remarkable run of postseason appearances in 1991 -- no other team in baseball history has more than five straight -- Atlanta has captured just one World Series title, the six-game triumph over the Cleveland Indians three years ago. Three other seasons ended with World Series defeats. Two others were snuffed out in the NLCS, including a six-game loss to Brown and the Florida Marlins a year ago. "I'm not overly concerned about how many World Series we have or haven't won," Glavine said. "I don't really care what's happened with this team in the past in terms of the postseason and whether or not people are disappointed with our achievements, or lack thereof. We don't really care what people think. We're here to win and we're trying to win." The Braves have yet to take a game in this NLCS, despite the best regular-season mark in franchise history (106-56), a three-game sweep of the Cubs in the first round, and having Randy Johnson and the Houston Astros eliminated by the Padres in the other first-round matchup. After two days in Atlanta, it looks more and more like San Diego -- not the Braves -- will be moving on the World Series. The Braves best hope is to do the same thing to the Padres that the Yankees did to Atlanta in the 1996 World Series. After losing the first two games at Yankee Stadium, New York beat Atlanta four straight to claim the title. "We were up 2-0 after playing in the hardest stadium in sports and we still lost that series," Smoltz recalled. "Nothing is set in stone. You've still got to win four games. I don't care how you do it or when you do it." The Braves also could dredge up tapes from the NLCS that same year, when they fell behind 3-1 against St. Louis before winning the final three games. But hope is fading.
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