Tag: baseball

I’m still relatively new to town, not a Braves fan. But I’ve followed baseball most of my life, and I’ve gotta say that some Braves fans seem to have an inflated sense of their own suffering. You’ve had, what, two losing seasons in the past twenty-three? Fifteen division championships? Five pennants? C’mon!

As a sportswriter and producer for outlets like ESPN, Turner Broadcasting, and the New York Times, Robert Weintraub writes about the action that unfolds on the field of court in front of him in real time. But in his other career, as a Decatur-based author focusing on the history of the nation’s pastime, Weintraub has spent hours upon hours in libraries from St. Louis to Cooperstown scouring old newspapers and taped interviews trying to see the game’s golden age through contemporary eyes. The latest result is The Victory Season (Little Brown Books), a broad, yet incisive look at the 1946 baseball season, the first after the end of World War II, when changed players and fans were coming home from the front to find stingy salaries, unfair contracts, and a game in desperate need of structural—and social—reform.

In the predawn hours of July 5, 1985, in the eighteenth inning of a twice-rain-delayed game against the Mets, an unassuming Braves relief pitcher named Rick Camp smacked a two-out solo home run to send the game into the nineteenth.

By any measure, John Smoltz’s twenty-two-year professional career was remarkable. A Cy Young winner and eight-time All-Star, Smoltz is the most recent pitcher to join the 3,000 strikeout club and the only one ever to top both 200 wins and 150 saves.

Bobby Cox has been to Europe only once and wasn’t terribly impressed. He says “Gah-dawgit” and pulls off his cap to muss his hair when a memory eludes him. He uses long silences to make a point about as often as he uses an obscenity that rhymes with the surname of former Phillies first baseman and familiar nemesis John Kruk.

He is easier to love as a legend than he was as Henry Louis Aaron, No. 44. Or so it seems. He's just as black as he ever was. He still speaks his mind, unafraid jar someone's consciousness, even stoke the fires of anger. But even when, as a result, he receives a letter of disagreement, most of them don't open with Dear Nigger, anymore.

He is almost always just Hank. He is recognized wherever he goes and people want to touch him, get his autograph and pose for pictures with him. He was 20 when he began these sojourns, swatting No. 1 in 1954, when Eisenhower was President.

There's a cavernous concrete oval rising like an elevator on the edge of town, and Ivan Allen Jr. has staked a piece of his political future on his ability to fill it with mayor league ballplayers and playing customers. What will it mean for the city?