Six Games In, Let the Fun Begin!

One series certainly does not make a season; neither do two. You need to at least take an entire month or two of baseball into account before you can even begin forecasting the fate of a given team. But you have to like what you saw from the Atlanta Braves last week in the season’s first six games.

Three road wins against the solid Philadelphia Phillies and then taking two out of three against the mighty New York Mets is certainly a good way to start a season. Three of the five wins were of the come-from-behind variety; two of the five came in extra innings. But it was Sunday’s victory that proved to be the most improbable and important of them all.

Trailing for most of the afternoon, Atlanta had only one hit through four innings and then proceeded to leave a total of six men on base over the next three. When the bottom of the eighth finally rolled around, the Braves were still facing a 2-1 deficit and the infamous "Jonesboys" were due up. Chipper led off with a stand-up double and Andruw unceremoniously struck-out swinging. The two guys who have spent the last several years comprising the heart of Atlanta ’s lineup have begun the year with batting averages that would make Bob Uecker cringe. Up until Chipper’s lead-off double, the pair (and the entire team for that matter) were relying heavily on the number five and six hitters in the lineup - namely Brian McCann and Jeff Francoeur - to come up big.

And come up big they did.

McCann followed Andruw’s strikeout with a double to left, driving in Chipper, and Francoeur promptly doubled to right, which drove in McCann and gave Atlanta a 3-2 lead they would not surrender.

Surrendering is something the Braves did a lot of last year. Time after time (after time after time), the 2006 version of this team raised the white flag and just gave up. You knew exactly when it was coming. Every time Bobby Cox picked up the bullpen phone to make the call, it was over. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the supporting cast of Atlanta ’s pitching staff was about as consistent as they come. Consistently bad, that is. Even the most casual fan knows that had the bullpen held the lead for only half of the games they lost for John Smoltz, the veteran would have walked away with the Cy Young Award.

But that was last year. This year is different. It just has to be.

The Braves aren’t going to be caught handing the National League East to the Mets two years in a row. And, let’s face it, that’s exactly what happened last year. Going back to the John Smoltz theory of bullpen ineptitude: if they could have simply held the lead for half of those games, Atlanta at the worst wins the wild card and at best the whole division.

Be that as it may, they did not win their division in 2006 for the first time since the Bush administration was in office – Bush number forty-one, that is – and they couldn’t even string together a run at a wild card berth. But the Braves are back and, six games into the season at least, they are for real. If the Jonesboys can get their bats going and Kelly Johnson proves to be even a little more adept than Marcus Giles in the lead-off spot, this will be a very tough team to beat.

No, six games does not a season make, but what I’ve seen so far sure beats the heck out of the 162 they played last year.