The Braves are moving on. Atlanta beat Philadelphia 6-2 on Thursday night in the decisive Game 3 of the NL Wild Card Series, three home runs doing the heavy lifting and Chris Sale getting the ball to shut the door, and that is the first postseason series this franchise has won since the 2021 World Series.
Five years is a long time to be very good in the regular season and very brief in October. That is the part of this that will stick. Atlanta has had the roster, the division titles, the run differential, all of it, and kept running into a short series where the bats went quiet at the worst possible hour. And more than once it was Philadelphia doing the eliminating, which is why Thursday night in a Game 3 against those same Phillies carried a particular weight. The ghost got answered.
The Sale decision is the detail I keep turning over. You do not hand your ace a save situation in July. You do it when there is no tomorrow and you have decided that the best arm in the building is going to be the one holding the ball when the season either continues or stops. That is a manager with no cards left in his hand and no interest in saving any. I do not have the full homer log in front of me yet, but 6-2 with three balls over the fence tells you the shape of it well enough: Atlanta slugged, Philadelphia did not, and in a three-game series that is usually the entire story.
checked the almanac: that 2021 championship was Atlanta's first since 1995, and the team that won it was built on bullpen depth and a deadline outfield nobody saw coming. five years later, the first series win since belongs to a swing of the bat and a starter working out of the pen. baseball keeps its sense of humor.
What comes next is not kind. The Braves head to Los Angeles on Saturday for a 4:00 PM ET first pitch, and the Dodgers do not care how long anybody's drought was. For Philadelphia, it is a winter of hard questions about a core that has now spent several Octobers one round short of where the payroll says it should be.
I will be watching how Atlanta's rotation lines up after using Sale that way. When your best arm throws on the last night of one series, the first night of the next one looks different.