Adversity couldn’t stop Atlanta Braves’ World Series championship run

It ended when Dansby Swanson fielded a two-hopper and fired it over to first baseman Freddie Freeman, but it started with a flurry of July phone calls.

The Atlanta Braves went into the postseason with the worst record of any of the qualified teams, and it was the joint-lowest win total of any Braves postseason team in franchise history. But this 88-win team that was left for dead in July did what six other 100-win Braves teams failed to and hoisted the Commissioner’s Trophy after defeating the Houston Astros in the World Series.

But over the course of seven months leading up to the celebrations 26 years in the making, the Braves defeated much more than just the Astros.

The Braves went into the All Star Break with a 44-45 record, and had just lost superstar outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. for the season with a torn ACL. Acuña had 24 home runs and 53 RBIs before the injury, and was the biggest reason the Braves were still within shouting distance of a playoff spot.

The Braves also shuffled through six different catchers while regular starter Travis d’Arnaud recovered from a torn thumb ligament. Ace starting pitcher Max Fried struggled early in the season before finding his way onto the injured list, and fellow young starter Mike Soroka re-tore his achilles in the middle of his rehab from a 2020 achilles tear. Surprise starter Huascar Ynoa missed two months after he broke his pitching hand punching the dugout bench after a start in Milwaukee.

All of it led to a team on the outer fringes of playoff contention and no real identity at the halfway point of the season. The Braves had not spent a single day with a record over .500 when general manager Alex Anthopolous executed the first of four trade deadline deals for outfielders.

It started when he traded first base prospect Bryce Ball to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for outfielder Joc Pederson. The former Cub and member of the 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers team that eliminated the Braves in the NLCS soon had three more new outfielders as teammates.

Anthopolous traded prospect Kasey Kalich for struggling Kansas City Royals outfielder Jorge Soler, brought former Brave Adam Duvall back to the roster from the Marlins in exchange for catcher Alex Jackson and traded pinch-hitter Pablo Sandoval to Cleveland for Eddie Rosario.

At the time of the trade deadline, the Braves were still under .500. They were in the middle of a streak of 17 consecutive games alternating wins and losses, the longest stretch of games without a streak in MLB history.

Heading into the first full series of August, the Braves were 52-55 and five games behind the first-place New York Mets. But armed with reinforcements, Atlanta went 36-18 over the final third of the regular season. A 9-0 record on an August road trip vaulted the team back into contention, and a 7-3 clip on a 10-game west coast trip in late September all but wrapped up the National League East division. Atlanta officially clinched the division with four games remaining on Sept. 30 by defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 5-3 at Truist Park.

Once the calendar turned to October, the run crossed the line from a surprising regular season finish to a surreal postseason charge. It was a run that flipped every script, one where a quarter century of the pendulum being stuck on bad October karma finally swung the other way.

The Braves had not won a playoff series at the end of a full-length season since 2001, losing in the division series on eight consecutive occasions dating back to 2001. They fell behind in the NLDS after a 2-1 loss in Game 1 and another early exit looked possible, but they did not lose again against the Milwaukee Brewers. Pederson landed the decisive blow in Game 3 with a pinch-hit three-run home run, and the Braves overcame 2-0 and 4-2 deficits the next day to eliminate the Brewers with a 5-4 win in a game Charlie Morton started on short rest.

The Los Angeles Dodgers lurked next. The team that knocked the Braves out of the postseason in 2013, 2018 and 2020 won 106 games in the regular season and were in the NLCS for the fifth time in six seasons.

The Braves started the series with back-to-back walk-off wins, the first time they had done that in the postseason since the worst-to-first Braves did it in the 1991 World Series. Rosario went 14-for-25 in the series with a four-hit game in a 9-2 win at Dodger Stadium and the decisive three-run shot off Walker Buehler in the clinching game of the series.

Tyler Matzek added another mile to his storybook journey from being completely out of professional baseball in 2018 to being a World Series champion in 2021 when he struck out three consecutive Dodgers with the tying runs in scoring position in the seventh inning, the last time Los Angeles would put a runner on base in the series.

And after Pederson was the offensive star of the NLDS and Rosario became NLCS MVP, another trade deadline acquisition stole the show in the World Series. Soler became the first player ever to lead off a World Series with a home run, and that set the tone for the series. Soler went on to hit the game-winning home run both in a Game 4 win in Atlanta and the championship-clinching Game 6 win in Houston.

When the 27th out of Game 6 settled in Freddie Freeman’s glove, there was nothing left. There was not going to be the same ending as the playoff runs of the past quarter century. There was no room for a backup catcher hitting a hanging slider into the Fulton County Stadium bullpen, an 18-inning elimination game loss, an infield fly or a 10-run first inning.

There were only celebrations for a team that cycled through 56 different players during a tumultuous regular season and pieced itself together at the trade deadline. It was a sweet win for Brian Snitker, a manager who has worked for the organization since 1977, and for a fanbase scattered around the country thanks to Ted Turner’s superstation.

The game ended in Freeman’s glove, but the scenes of jubilation on the field and in the stands that started at the last out will last throughout the winter.