Photograph by Rick Stewart /Allsport/Getty Images
Sometimes you’re simply in the right place at the right time.
In the fall of 1995, I was working on a story about Chipper Jones and his rookie season with the Atlanta Braves. The team had six days off between the playoffs and the World Series against Cleveland, and manager Bobby Cox decided to have a live batting practice to keep everyone’s game sharp.
A normal batting practice means stepping into the cage to face one of the coaches throwing pitches at about half the speed of a major league pitcher. A live batting practice meant stepping into the cage to face Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Mark Wohlers throwing at game speed. I strolled up to the batting cage and positioned myself directly behind backup catcher Charlie O’Brien.
O’Brien played in 53 games that season, mostly as Maddux’s personal catcher, and he was talking smack to the hitters as they stepped into the batter’s box. “No hits today,” he’d say. “You’re gonna miss this pitch like you forgot to wear your glasses. You might as well go sit back down now and conserve your energy.”
I was surprised that I was one of only a handful of reporters taking in the batting practice. When would I ever be this close to a Maddux two-seam fastball? Or a Glavine circle changeup? Or a Wohlers fastball?
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that the Atlanta Braves won only one World Championship during the Bobby Cox era. The team set a standard for excellence with a record 14-straight Eastern Division championships and made it to the World Series five times in the 1990s—in 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, and 1999. There was a lot of bad luck in those World Series: baserunning gaffes, a botched suicide squeeze, and a heartbreakingly lazy slider to the New York Yankees’ Jim Leyritz in 1996.
But it was still a magical time to be a baseball fan in Atlanta. The team was full of future Hall of Famers: Maddux, Glavine, John Smoltz, Chipper, Fred McGriff, and Cox. They were a fun bunch to be around. Once, before a game, Maddux motioned me over to his locker. The Braves had just acquired Ken Caminiti, who took the locker next to Maddux. He was shaking his head. “That locker is cursed,” he said, glancing at it. “Whoever gets that locker is never back the next season.” He listed off the names of the five previous players who’d had the locker; none of them had a second season with Atlanta. Neither did Caminiti.
Watching Maddux pitch that afternoon was an education. His balls dipped and darted, and his fastball was quicker than he was ever given credit for. Glavine worked the corners (and a little “outside” the corners) as he did in games. The Braves hitters looked madly outclassed, but, hey, it was Maddux and Glavine; they spent their careers making batters
look outclassed.
Then came the closer: Wohlers. He threw straight heat, a fastball consistently in the high 90s—he had struck out 90 batters in 64.2 innings pitched that season. I noticed an odd thing with his first pitch: There was an audible sizzle as his fastball sliced through the air. The batters he faced swung like five-year-olds with a plastic bat, then walked out of the cage and laughed at the absurdity of trying to hit a Wohlers’s fastball.
Maddux pitched a two-hit shutout in the first game of the World Series, and Glavine shut down Cleveland to win the second game. After that, the Braves were on their way. With Glavine on the mound hurling a shutout in Game 6, he came into the dugout in the middle of the game and screamed, “Will somebody please score a damned run? Because they’re not.” In the sixth inning, right fielder David Justice lifted a solo home run, and the Braves had their first World Series victory since 1957, when the team was still in Milwaukee.
In this issue—and in an accompanying online oral history—we pay homage to the 30th anniversary of that championship. As memorable as those games were, for me that championship will always be personified not by a sight, but by a sound: sizzle.
This article appears in our November 2025 issue.
