They shine brightly and radiantly, contrary to almost all expectations. In the final series of the North American baseball world championship, the Atlanta Braves will compete with the Houston Astros from Tuesday evening, the first pitch should fly at 7 p.m. sharp and 9 minutes local time (1.09 a.m. CEST) in Minute Maid Park, where the latter are based. By all conventional standards, given the performance of both teams during the regular season, it is, to put it mildly, rather unexpected.
While within the same three other teams dominated and achieved a hundred or more wins in a total of 162 games, neither the men from Georgia (88) nor the Texans (95) were allowed to jump this bar. But because God, i.e. the men of Major League Baseball (MLB), set the play-offs before moving into the World Series, the top marks of the San Francisco Giants (107), the Los Angeles Dodgers (106) and the Tampa Bay Rays (100) in the final account as a lost labor. While the Astros, if they are not cheating – as it turned out two years ago, they illegally spied on the signals of the opposing pitchers in 2017 and 2018 – have a permanent subscription to participation in the final (three times in the past five years), Until recently, no one really had the Braves on their radar.
The astonishment was correspondingly great when the men, led by Head Coach Brian Snitker, sealed the final against the defending champions from Los Angeles on Saturday evening in their home in Truist Park. When the last pitch was thrown, it was 4-2 on points as after games, and the Braves deservedly celebrated their first finals series entry in over 20 years.
Brian Snitker surprisingly led the Braves into the final series.
– © what / afp / Getty / Kevin Cox
At that time, however, they had nothing to report. In 1999 they went down 4-0 against the New York Yankees – a remarkable story also because it was the last time a team could win the World Series in two consecutive years. The Astros had already closed the sack on Friday. With an impressive 5-0 in front of a home crowd, they threw the Boston Red Sox out of the competition and also only needed six games.
Tradition is on the side of the braves
As far as the assessments of the bookmakers in Las Vegas are concerned, the players supervised by Head Coach Dusty Baker are not only the clear favorites for this reason, even if tradition is on the side of the Braves. In contrast to the Astros, first founded as Colt.45s at the beginning of the 1960s, who most likely owed their only championship four years ago to their swindles – for which, strangely enough, the league only punished officials, but not a single player – Atlanta has already made it into the history books as the winner three times (1914, 1954, 1995). The key to success is not only the professional gamblers’ experience of Baker, who, in contrast to his opponent, was allowed to hold the Commissioner’s Trophy as a player (1981 with the Dodgers).
At 72, the African-American is the second-oldest head coach to ever coach a team in a series of finals – a lone record surpassed only by “Trader Jack” McKeown, who saw the light of day around five months before Baker and in 2003 with the success of the Florida Marlins (now Miami Marlins) sat on the bench. Although Braves coach Snitker is no longer the youngest at a tender 66, he and Baker are not only worlds apart from the outside. While Baker began his playing career in Atlanta at a time when racial segregation was still common in the American South, and only became a star on the West Coast (Dodgers, Giants, Oakland Athletics), Snitker, whose career as a player was himself, serves limited to the minor leagues, the Braves practically uninterrupted in various functions since the late 1970s.
Even if Baker did not want to achieve the big hit as head coach so far, he has built a reputation for himself as a conscientious worker since the nineties – one that is said, however, that he too often relies on veterans and tends to develop younger players difficult. A fact that is also reflected in the relevant statistics and up until this season often served as a reason why his teams (Giants, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Washington Nationals) regularly make it into the play-offs, but never so far beyond that. By moving into the 2021 World Series, Baker left at least part of the curse behind.
