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Yankees vs. A's |
Mariners vs. White Sox |
Braves vs. Cardinals |
Mets vs. Giants
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Monday, October 9
Braves know cold, hard facts not in their favor
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
ST. LOUIS -- One day into the postseason, and the Atlanta Braves see their whole season passing before their eyes.
Get a team into these best-of-five division series, and one lousy day -- even one lousy inning -- can undo six months of work.
|  | | The Braves' playoff hopes may rest on Tom Glavine's performance in Game 2. |
So after one day, one disastrous first inning, one loss to the Cardinals in Game 1 of their first-round matchup, and the Braves are in trouble. They know it. The numbers show it.
Consider the cold, hard facts:
Twenty teams before this year lost the opener in the Division Series. Only six (or 30 percent) came back to win the series.
In the National League Division Series, those facts are even colder and harder -- just one out of 10 first-game losers came back to win. The only good news for the Braves is: They were the one team to do it, last October when they lost their opener to the Astros and then won three straight.
Now add in the 32 League Championship Series that were best of five: out of 52 Game 1 losers, only 17 (32.7 percent) scrambled back to win the series. It's just six of 26 (23.1 percent) in the NL.
So that, friends, is why Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone was sitting in front of his locker Wednesday morning, grumbling: "These best-of-fives are the worst."
And he says that as a member of a team that has survived these five-game crap shoots better than any other team in the sport.
In their first five trips to the Division Series, the Braves never lost one. Incredibly, they've never even been forced to a fifth game.
But that doesn't mean they haven't had their scares. To find the biggest of all, they have to look back no further than last October, when they barely lived through a 12-inning Game 3 classic that would have left them trailing Houston two games to one.
To get through that game, they needed to use four of their five starting pitchers (Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Terry Mulholland and closer du jour Kevin Millwood) in one wild and crazy baseball game. ("And we'd never have done that," Mazzone said, "in a best-of-seven.")
To get through that game, they also needed the most acrobatic play of Walt Weiss' career to scramble out of a bases-loaded, no-out, John Rocker nightmare in the ninth.
And afterward, once they'd finally won, their locker room shook with passion and relief -- because they knew just how close they'd come to having their entire season fall apart.
"That clubhouse that day was the wildest I've seen since I've been with this crew," Weiss recalled Wednesday. "That's the most emotion I've seen from this whole team in my time here. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that it was a five-game series ... and when you get down in a five-game series, that's a situation you don't want to be in."
Well, it's a situation the Braves happen to be in right now -- with 20-game winner Darryl Kile waiting to double their misery Thursday afternoon, too.
"We've got a 20-game winner going," said the Cardinals' Eric Davis on Wednesday. "He's been our best pitcher. He's been our most consistent pitcher. I don't think you could have a better situation."
"It's a tough task for us," Weiss agreed. "And it's a nice situation for them -- up 1-0 and having their ace ready to start the next one. The thing with us is, we've got a few aces."
Thursday's ace of the day is Glavine, who went 21-9 himself this year. And significantly, seven of Glavine's last eight wins came after Braves losses. But rarely in his distinguished Braves tenure has he been called upon to stop a more important losing streak than this one.
How vital? Only the '99 Red Sox and '95 Mariners have climbed out of a two-games-to-none pit during the Division Series era.
"To me," Mazzone said, "the best-of-five takes away from what you've accomplished over the long haul. It takes away the depth of your ballclub, which is what allowed you to win over 162 games. It really raises the chances for an upset of a team that won 95-100 games. You might play three, and you're gone. If the schedule falls right, you only need two starting pitchers to do it, too."
It suddenly seems more plausible than ever, in fact. For five years, the Braves have taken a certain aura into the postseason. But after their horrific loss Sunday to end the regular season and their gruesome first inning Tuesday in St. Louis, that aura seems to be missing this postseason. And they aren't the only ones looking for that aura.
The Indians aren't even here. The Red Sox aren't here. The regular cast of postseason characters has gotten all shaken up. And while the Braves and Yankees are around, never have they looked more vulnerable than they do this October.
This is the sixth straight season the Braves and Yankees have reached the playoffs together. When they both lost their openers Tuesday, it marked only the second time in any of those six postseasons that they'd both found themselves trailing in series simultaneously.
The other was in 1998, when the Yankees lost two of the first three games of the ALCS to Cleveland (before winning in six) and the Braves got behind the Padres, three games to none, in the NLCS (before losing in six).
But never had both been trailing at the same time in the first round. And that's a telling statement on just how wide open this particular postseason looks.
Think there's no sense of urgency in that Braves clubhouse right now? They're thinking about bringing back Greg Maddux again to start Game 3 Saturday, three days after his Game 1 loss. If they lose Game 2, you can almost bet on that.
"All I know," Mazzone said, "is that this is the most nerve-wracking part of any postseason. If you don't get through this thing, you feel like you wasted your whole damn season. Win all those games -- for what?"
Well, the Braves won 95 of those games this year in the regular season. But it sure is funny how all of a sudden, one day into the postseason, it felt like they'd won zero.
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