Starting and Closing

by John Smoltz

  On that fateful night, Game Three of the World Series, it was as if the baseball gods consecrated the Yankees and cursed the Braves. After that night, the Yankees would go on not only to win that World Series after being down two games to none, but to dominate the next few years, winning the Series three out of the next four. (And that’s not even counting a runner-up finish in 2001.) On the other hand, since that date, the Braves have yet to win another World Series game. Despite stringing together nine more division titles, we would make it back to the World Series only one more time. That was in 1999, when we were swept in four games by—wait for it—the Yankees.

  And then there’s the Florida Marlins: an expansion team that had existed for only four years in 1997 when they won it all. When they clinched the wild card that year, they were little more than a nice, feel-good story for baseball. That is, until they swept the San Francisco Giants 3–0 in the National League Division Series and then beat us 4–2 in the National League Championship Series. The next thing you know, the Marlins are popping open bottles of champagne on national TV after defeating the Cleveland Indians in the World Series in seven games. And not only did they win it all in ’97, but they pulled off another improbable wild-card World Series win, over the Yankees no less, in 2003. If the Florida Marlins can win two World Series without ever winning their division, it’s safe to assume that anything is possible.

  When it comes down to it, I’ll admit I do have a few regrets, but it’s not like I would go back and change everything if I could. I certainly don’t look back and wish that I could have been a Yankee or a Marlin instead of a Brave. Not at all. And even if you offered me a choice, even if you told me, “John, you could either have two world championships or fourteen straight division titles”—I’m taking the fourteen straight every time. Every time. I seriously wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for one more championship.

  As a player, I wanted nothing more than a chance to compete in October; it’s the most exciting thing that can happen to a player. As a member of the Braves during that magical run, I reached the postseason for almost a decade and a half straight. That’s just unreal, especially when you consider that some guys spend their entire career toiling away on teams that never even get a whiff of the playoffs. The closest some guys have ever come to the World Series is a nice pair of seats along the first-base line. Looking back, I was really spoiled: I played almost every year knowing we had a chance.

  Our record is a proud one and one that stands alone. Nobody had ever done it before and it’s likely nobody will ever do it again. We had the time of our lives. We sacrificed for each other on the field, and for the most part, we were genuinely friends in the clubhouse. Despite having a roster stuffed with exceptionally talented athletes, we were never really bogged down by a bunch of big egos. Take Greg Maddux and Tommy Glavine for example.

  Without a doubt, Maddux and Glavine are the best right-hander and left-hander to ever be in the same rotation at the same time. Beyond that, they are two of the best pitchers ever. We’re talking about guys who routinely posted nineteen to twenty wins a season in their prime, who won three-hundred-plus games, and who have six Cy Young Awards between them. Both of them had the stats to have an attitude, demand special treatment, or otherwise cause a rift in the clubhouse. It never happened. They never displayed any animosity toward each other or anyone else. It was actually quite the opposite.

  Our entire rotation enjoyed a special camaraderie. We took things seriously, but we were always having fun, too. From the mound to the golf course, everything was a competition. We kept track of who lasted longer in their last game, who had laid down a bunt—and who didn’t—and who had hit the last RBI. Remember that triple Glavine hit in Game Seven of the National League Championship Series against the Cardinals in 1996? You know, the one where he knocked in three runs all by himself? Yeah, Maddux and I are still hearing about that one.

  Anyway, my point is, sure the championship issue is a sore one. Undoubtedly. But I think our team has earned its own distinction in baseball history, never mind the lack of an asterisk by our name. We were dominant, but we were also a team. We had poise. We had class. And I think you could say that by and large we were good to each other and to our fans. Looking back, I hope it’s those kinds of things that define our legacy. We were a bunch of guys getting paid to play a game we loved and we kept coming back, year after year, and competing, despite the odds. Rings or not, we played like champions. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Do I think we should have won more than one? Absolutely. And do I think that had we gotten a little more timely execution, it would have been more? Absolutely again. We would definitely have had a few. But one of the things that bothers me most about the conversation is the oversimplified attempt to find a single answer or two for why fourteen different teams didn’t win the ultimate prize. The truth is that during a number of those years we were fortunate to make the postseason at all and had no chance of winning the World Series, yet because those seasons fell within the fourteen-consecutive-division title streak, they add to this sense of world-class futility.

  The best way to get your arms around what we faced is to look at each year individually, and as I take you through this quickly, I think you will agree that the picture takes on a new look.

  Humor me for a second as we ever so briefly walk through the streak.

  1991—We shocked the world, including ourselves, by making it to the Series. We lost Game Seven by one run, but what you need to remember is that we were not picked to do anything.

  1992—Another year, another one-run loss, this time in Game Six. In our first two World Series appearances, nine games were decided by one run, and we were on the losing end of seven of them. These weren’t blowouts; we just weren’t as good.

  1993—This is the first time I think you can say we had a better team and we should have beaten the Phillies in the NLCS. But it’s the same story, again just one run, and what a difference it might have made.

  1994—No postseason due to the strike.

  1995—We were so lucky to get by the first round this year. Colorado had us beat, period, but then we proceeded to shut down the three best offenses playoff baseball had seen in a long time in the Rockies, the Reds, and the loaded Indians. We were finally champions.

  So after five years we were 1–2 in the World Series.

  1996—Now comes a year we would all like to forget, and I would say it was the last time we were truly dominant. This year we were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series, which still hurts to write.

  1997—We had a really good team again, and if you remember, the Marlins went out and spent a ton of money to try to knock us off and win the division. We still took the division, but played poorly early in the NLCS and the Marlins beat us with the help of great pitching by Liván Hernández and a strike zone that a forty-inch bat could not have helped. (I know we had a generous one as well, but you know I had to throw this in.) The Marlins went on to win it all.

  So that’s 1–3 in the years I felt that we were better. Now, here is where lumping in all of the next years is unrealistic, I believe, because these next few years we started to lose players both to injuries—key ones, I might add—and free agency.

  1998—Whether or not the Padres should have beaten us, the Yankees were a very good team.

  1999—We had no business making it to the NLCS, not to mention the World Series. This team lost players at the end of the season, but just knew how to fight. We did get swept by the Yankees in the World Series, but I maintain it was the closest sweep ever. In Games One and Three we took a lead into the eighth inning, but allowed the Yankees to come back and win both games.

  The remaining years we did not get out of the first round of the playoffs. We truly were probably in a rebuilding era, but because of our continued success at finding ways to win the division every year, the frustration mounted and we were somehow viewed as failures.

  The fact that John Schuerholz and Bob
by Cox gave us a chance to win it all every year—remember, to win it all, you HAVE to make the playoffs first—was amazing. We won when the team was rebuilding, while most teams don’t go to the playoffs when they are in transition. We won because our manager could take a variety of different teams with certain weaknesses and win, teams that had a lot of injuries, and still make it.

  And finally, I would suggest that even the most widely accepted baseball theories and philosophies, although good on paper, don’t always neatly sum up the final results. When a team has that special mojo, or whatever you want to call it, sometimes the game and its history can be turned upside down and things happen that you really can’t explain.

  We were provided with one of the most amazing and blatant exceptions to all the supposed rules with the 2011 World Champions, the St. Louis Cardinals. What the Cardinals did transcends any theory or philosophy of anything that could or should happen in the game. They weren’t supposed to be in the playoffs, but they got there. They weren’t supposed to win, but they kept winning. And they won in miraculous ways. I mean, you can’t even describe Game Six of the 2011 Series. It’s unfathomable to think that at two different times, down to their very last strike, they could come back and go on to win the World Series. The St. Louis Cardinals arguably won with a weaker team than the teams that were supposed to win it all. And that can’t be explained other than to say they took advantage of their moment in ways most, including some of our Braves teams, couldn’t manage.

  As has been proved time and time again, baseball’s champion is not always determined by the most wins in the regular season—I think we won more games over those fourteen years than any other franchise—the biggest budgets, or the strongest starting pitching. Championships can come in very weird and complicated ways, ways that not even Cardinals manager Tony La Russa can truly explain.

  It’s hard to describe in a few broad generalizations what happened and why on the whole we only managed to win it all once, because like I said, it’s really hard to generalize fourteen years of baseball. The truth is, there isn’t one reason. There might be one reason for each year, but there’s not one reason for all fourteen. All I am offering here are a few opinions that might help make sense of something that is, generally speaking, hard to understand.

  And honestly, while I may have strung together a few nuggets of wisdom here, at the end of the day, I’m also almost convinced that there may be no better or more complete answer than this: Baseball is a beautiful game, but it can also be brutally heartbreaking sometimes.

  With those thoughts in mind, I offer you four observations about the futility that overtook us during our streak: (1) It’s not Bobby Cox’s fault. (2) Superior pitching wins baseball games, but power pitching is a bonus in the postseason. (3) Starting pitching is great, but timely hitting is better. And (4) Sometimes fate just kicks your butt.

  1. It’s not Bobby Cox’s fault.

  Bobby Cox has taken more bullets about this than almost anyone else, and it’s high time that credit is given where credit is due. If you aren’t a die-hard Braves fan, you might not realize how influential Bobby was in building the team that would start our historic run. He was actually the Braves’ general manager from 1985 to 1990, back when the only thing the Braves were competing for every year was the basement of the NL West. Bobby was the man responsible for righting our ship and turning things around. He made big, sweeping changes: revamping Atlanta’s minor league system; stocking a stable of young arms, including myself, Glavine, and Steve Avery; and acquiring or drafting young talent, including David Justice and some guy named Chipper Jones. Bobby Cox had put together a talented young team, but it would take a few years to translate this into tangible wins on the field.

  When June 1990 rolled around, Bobby moved to the dugout to serve as our manager and general manager until October, when John Schuerholz was brought in to be the new GM. It was the very next year, 1991, that our team notoriously went from worst to first and took the World Series into the tenth inning of Game Seven, before eventually losing 1–0 to the Twins in what is widely regarded as one of the best Series of all time. Bobby had helped build the nucleus of that team.

  While Bobby helped lay the framework for our run, he also deserves a ton of recognition for sustaining our run. You don’t win any division for fourteen years straight without finding ways to win games that you have no business winning, statistically speaking.

  You can always second-guess a manager’s moves: “Why pull the starter now? Hit and run here … are you kidding me?” Believe me, every player plays manager in his mind sometimes and you wonder what the real manager is up to. It’s easy to do. But trust me: Bobby’s moves were always calculated, made with the intention of preserving a lead, preserving his athletes, or generating some offense when the run-support well had run dry. He knew things the rest of us didn’t know, saw things even the best in the game didn’t see. This is what good managers do—they know the odds, they know the percentages, and they are always looking for opportunities to exploit another team’s weakness and put their own players in position to crack open games. And Bobby did that better than anybody, if you ask me.

  2. Superior pitching wins baseball games, but power pitching is a bonus in the postseason.

  During our historic run, we enjoyed the best rotation in all of baseball, maybe even the all-time best. When you face a 162-game schedule with Greg Maddux, Tommy Glavine, myself, and Steve Avery on the mound, there’s no denying that you are going to have a better chance to win more games than any other team. The best rotation can get you to the postseason, as we proved year after year, but things change when you get to the postseason.

  Playoff baseball is so different from the regular season. Everything becomes condensed and magnified at the same time. In a postseason game, every hit and every pitch matters. In playoff baseball, a man on first is a rally and the crowd knows it. Everyone is dialed in, on task and sharp, and there are no free rides. Pitchers don’t throw away pitches and hitters don’t give away at-bats. This laserlike focus is only heightened by the fact that you never know when a moment might win or lose a game. When it comes to elimination games, there literally is no tomorrow.

  What all this boils down to is that everybody makes adjustments to their strategies to survive and increase their odds of winning. Good hitters know that if they are facing finesse pitchers like Tom Glavine or Greg Maddux, a higher-percentage strategy is to take away part of the plate and settle for making contact. To put it simply, the more contact generated, the more chances a team has to be successful in the shorter format of the postseason. I, personally, am convinced that it’s harder to be successful with a staff full of finesse pitchers in the postseason because you have to be that much more perfect. I’m convinced that if you live on contact and throwing strikes out of the zone, you don’t always reap the benefit of it in the playoffs.

  Hitters facing finesse pitchers during the regular season are much more likely to try to do more with the ball, like pull it down the line. This is precisely how Maddux and Glavine made their living; during the regular season, they won this battle more times than not.

  Now, theories are nice and all, but the other thing I know is that when Tommy and Greg were on the top of their game, it didn’t matter what approach the hitters took; the pitchers were going to win.

  It’s a different story for a power, or fastball, pitcher like me. The postseason gave me the opportunity to use other gears that would make it tougher on hitters. These extra gears allowed me to increase the velocity of my pitches and the sharpness of my breaking balls.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why wasn’t I doing this over the course of the thirty-five-odd starts I would get in the regular season? The short answer is that there’s no way to do it. There’s no way to sustain this type of effort. This is reserved for the games that look like they could be your last.

  I think that in theory, the fastball pitcher has a better chance to be successful in the postseason because
he can be aggressive and challenge hitters and feed off the intensity of the postseason. It doesn’t do much good for finesse pitchers to try to feed off the intensity because they aren’t going to benefit from throwing the ball harder; their finesse pitches and their command are their weapons.

  So what do you do? Who do you start and when? Our manager, Bobby Cox, had the daunting task of trying to crack this code and figure out the order of his rotation every year. Every year there were some very tough choices—choices the likes of which other managers were surely jealous of—like which twenty-game-win starter goes first? And which future Hall of Famer goes second? In 1996, I made the decision easier for Bobby with the way I was pitching that year, and I got a chance to start Game One of the postseason for Atlanta. But in other years, maybe it wasn’t so clear. What I can say is that wherever I pitched, I was very fortunate to be in positions to pitch some incredible games, and ones that would ultimately bring home a championship in 1995.

  Now, I used to think the more power pitching you had, the better chance you had to be successful, but that has obviously been disproved on more than a couple occasions. But with that said, in theory, I still believe it’s a great formula to have that go-to power guy, that guy who can strike out ten or eleven guys in a game when you need it, because it could lead to more wins when they count the most.

  3. Starting pitching is great, but timely hitting is better.

  Strong starting pitching often delivers you to the postseason, but in the playoffs you are all but destined to go up against other great starting pitching. I think our run all but proves that a lack of timely hitting can hurt you way more than a starter who can’t get you safely into the sixth inning.