They never even won a playoff game, much less a series. The NHL sent Atlanta another team, the Thrashers, but they left, too, bolting for Winnipeg after just 11 seasons. Of course, they would go on to win a Stanley Cup title in their new home. The Flames didn’t stick around very long, moving to Calgary in 1980 after whiffing on all six of their playoff appearances. But, as the losses piled up and occasional shots at glory crashed in inevitable defeat, all four teams would come to be viewed as more trouble than they were worth.Ītlanta, which liked to market itself as the “City Too Busy To Hate,” earned another embarrassing moniker. Those franchises provided a huge boost to Atlanta’s fragile self-image, stamping a growing city just emerging from the civil right movement as truly major league. Louis two years later, followed by the NHL’s Flames in 1972.
That was the year the Braves moved in from Milwaukee and the Falcons took flight as an NFL expansion team. The Braves are the only Atlanta team to win a championship in the four major American sports, which first arrived in the Deep South in 1966. “You boys are going to be world champions the rest of your lives,” Snitker told his team in the champagne-soaked visiting clubhouse, holding up the trophy that every team has their sights set on from the first day of spring training.Īll that bubbly had to feel cleansing in a way, exorcising the demons of not only a team, but an entire city. It didn’t matter that they had to go down to the final week to finally clinch first place in a division derisively known as the NL Least. It didn’t matter that they were mired in mediocrity much of the season, finally climbing above. It didn’t matter that they won just 88 games during the regular season, fewer than every other playoff team and even two teams that didn’t make the postseason.
Shaking off the disappointment of Game 5, when they squandered a 4-0 lead and a chance to celebrate in front of their home fans, these Braves romped past the Houston Astros 7-0 to finish off the World Series four games to two.
To this day, it’s hard to fathom that a team assembled by a Hall of Fame general manager (John Schuerholz), guided by a Hall of Fame manager (Cox), led on the mound by three Hall of Fame pitchers (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz), with a lineup that included yet another Hall of Famer (Chipper Jones) and at least two other guys who can make a pretty good case for Cooperstown (Fred McGriff and Andruw Jones) contributed just one title to the franchise resume. The ‘95 Braves had been the only team to win it all during those 20 previous trips to the playoffs.Īnd even that victory, as glorious and satisfying as it was for a city that has known so much heartache, wound up feeling a bit hollow because of the four other times Atlanta lost the World Series during that single decade, a lone triumph nearly obscured by all the gut-wrenching disappointments. When you add it all up, that’s 21 postseason appearances in the last 30 completed seasons - a run that meets nearly every requirement to be called a dynasty except the only one that really matters. A painful rebuilding job came next, but it paid off with another streak of division titles that has grown to four.
They claimed another wild card in 2012, followed by a return to the top of the NL East in 2013. They got back to the postseason as a wild card in 2010, Bobby Cox’s final season as manager. The Braves won 14 straight division titles from 1991-2005, a staggering streak that may never be eclipsed. If they were the least bit familiar with their team’s history, they had to know how fickle the baseball gods can be. These guys never stopped believing in themselves.” “We used a lot of guys, we lost a lot of pieces over the course of the summer. “These guys never gave up on themselves,” manager Brian Snitker said.