I wrote the following piece in 2019, the day after the Braves collapsed in the NLDS against the St. Louis Cardinals. Ben was only 9; Evangeline was 6. We had no idea that we were only two years away from a World Series title, so the loss felt like just another postseason misfire and maybe our permanent heritage. When I look back at this piece, I’m grateful for the lesson my mother taught me the night the Braves lost the 91 World Series and the enduring sense of community through sports fandom she shared. Even now, our phone calls are bracketed by talk about the current status of the Braves or Dawgs. Now, almost five years later, both of my children are athletes and both have tasted the good and the bad of being a sports fan.
On Wednesday, when the Braves began their collapse in the first inning of game five, I started to receive text messages from friends.
“Sorry man…,” read one.
“Scanned the radio...not good...Long suffering fans must stick together!” said another.
One just said: “Ouch!”
Ironically, they came from fans of rival teams: the Indians, the Dodgers, even from the Cardinals. They were offering sympathy, truly. I live in Colorado now, where it feels like everyone is from somewhere else. Also, the story of a Braves collapse in the postseason is so common that even fans of other clubs seem to recognize that to rub it in would seem trite at this point.
As the evening gave way to the night, a front blew a snowstorm into our town. It was a sharp, decisive exclamation mark announcing the absolute end of summer. It’s true what A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote, “[Baseball] stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
We’ve been here so many times. I confess that, at thirty-nine, losing like this is just as hard as it was when I was an eleven year-old boy growing up on the southside of Atlanta. Like all of us, I have scar tissue and I have grown into an adult who learned that you could make it hurt less by quickly turning to the things in your life that need your attention: work, the kids, the actual problems of the world, etc. On the day it happens, though, it’s hard. Watching it happen again, especially as the Braves then had to play eight more excruciating, listless innings, felt like watching a funeral at Suntrust Park. It reminded me of the first time I felt this way after a baseball game.
It was less than an hour after Dan Gladden had touched home, securing the 1991 World Series for the Twins. I still remember the emptiness that I felt watching the Twins celebrate and the stillness of the Braves dugout. It would have been around midnight. Too late for any eleven year old. I remember my mother looked at me and told me to get my shoes on. We got in the car. I asked where we were going and she replied, looking at the road, “To see the Braves when they land.”
It didn’t take long for us to get to Hartsfield. It was the middle of the night, after all. What we were doing seemed crazy, even to me at the time. When we walked through the doors, still wearing the Braves gear we’d put on at the start of the game, the security guards just waved us through and told us to follow the other fans.
The trains weren’t running that late, so we walked down to the moving sidewalks. I remember being shocked at all of the people walking with us and then I heard something amazing: people were doing the tomahawk chop as they traveled down the sidewalk. They were doing rounds of “Let’s Go Braves!” They did this all the way until we arrived at the terminal the Braves were supposed to use.
We waited at the terminal for another hour before the door was propped open and the players, my boyhood heroes, began walking out. Lemke, Glavine, Justice, and others waved. I remember Pendleton pumped his fist and lingered with the crowd for an extra moment longer before he and the rest of the Braves disappeared through another door thirty yards away. It was a flash of lightning, but it was the closest I had ever been to them and they were still alive and some were even smiling as they greeted the fans. Everyone chanted and chopped and then we all turned to make the walk back down the corridor and, eventually, to the cars that would take us home.
When I think back to that night, I think of the warmth I felt being around other Braves fans in that terminal. Ironically, it was after the Braves lost the big game that I realized that they were probably the first thing outside of my family that I ever truly loved. I also think of my mother and her Roald Dahl-like parenting in that moment. She saw her son truly processing loss for the first time and gave me a valuable gift: the knowledge that I didn’t have to go it alone.
I hope I’m giving my son (9) that now. He loves baseball the way a child should love baseball. It’s mythical and magical. It’s imbued with meaning. I can’t take him down to the airport anymore, but I have shown him that he belongs to a kind of family.
As an adult, you realize that so much of life can be about being alone. Belonging to things is important. Sharing things, even loss, is healthy for us. This is what I thought when I saw that beautiful photograph in Thursday’s AJC of Ozzie Albies comforting his teammate Dansby Swanson. We don’t have a World Series championship in 2019, Atlanta, but we do have each other. That’s enough to get us through the winter.
Such a thoughtful piece, Joe. Thanks for sharing