The Atlanta Braves will play their second elimination game in three days Wednesday afternoon, when Max Fried leads them against Joe Musgrove of the San Diego Padres in Game 2 of their National League Wild Card series. With all due respect to Atlanta's handful of healthy players, the Braves are not wanted here! Four of their, what, six best players are out; the team only nosed into the Wild Card at all because of a preposterous first-in-history gap-day doubleheader, where everyone knew going in that both teams could advance with a split. It's hard to imagine a less legitimate playoff berth than one earned in the second of these two games, after your opponent has already lost all motivation.
It's clear that God has seen enough of the Braves. Three road teams won on Tuesday, including the even more road-weary New York Mets, who haven't played a game at home since Sept. 22 and who failed America by going hangover mode in Monday's late game and allowing Atlanta to shamble onwards. The Braves, meanwhile, advanced one single runner to third base in nine innings Tuesday night, struck out 15 times, and were ruthlessly blanked by playoff debutante Michael King and a pair of Padres relievers. For lack of anything even vaguely resembling a suitable alternative, Atlanta manager Brian Snitker handed the ball to A.J. Smith-Shawver, a 21-year-old prospect with fewer than 30 total innings of work in the majors, who threw 87 pitches for the big club this year, all of them back on May 23. Smith-Shawver watched his team squander a first-inning scoring opportunity, then took the mound in a Braves uniform for just the second time in 2024. Seven pitches later, this happened:
It's possible to admire a baseball team's gumption and competitive pride and still want them the hell out of your face for a while. I prefer to think of it as a compassionate response, and humane, not unlike the way I have felt about beloved family pets while arranging their trips to the rainbow bridge, except that I also regard the Braves as puke from hell. Personal animosity aside, the Braves simply should not and cannot survive long in their present condition. Ronald Acuña Jr. has been out since late May; Austin Riley was lost for the year in mid-August; the throwing arm of staff ace Spencer Strider kerploded all the way back in April, after nine total innings of work. The reanimated 900-year-old remains of Chris Sale, filling in admirably as Atlanta's replacement ace and currently the favorite for the National League Cy Young, finally failed over the weekend, and he was scratched first from the Monday doubleheader and now from the Wild Card series. At this rate, nobody would even blink if Fried's spinal column fell out of his body on his way to the stadium Wednesday. Atlanta would simply slot in a random guy with a mustache and continue this grim march.
This must end. Thankfully, the Padres seem like the team for the job. They are on an opposite trajectory: Where the Braves are physically dissolving into a puddle of goo, the Friars have only recently become healthy again, and are playing their best baseball of the season. Tatis Jr. and pitcher Yu Darvish returned from extended absences for the final month of the season, and the Padres have the best record in baseball since the July break. Here's a crazy fact: Tatis's huge sockdolager Tuesday night came on his first swing in a playoff game since 2020, and marked the first time in his career that he's performed in the playoffs in front of a live audience. San Diego failed to make the postseason in 2021 and 2023; they made it to the NLCS in 2022, but Tatis missed that entire campaign due to injuries and a suspension for the use of performance enhancing drugs. Tatis did sock a pair of huge dingers in the Wild Card series against the Cardinals in 2020, but those balls were caught by cardboard cutouts, filling in eerily with piped-in crowd sounds during the acute phase of the pandemic.
Tatis's talents and showmanship deserve this kind of stage. "Man, this crowd is unbelievable," he said after Tuesday's win, per the San Diego Union-Tribune. "I got a small taste of what is postseason baseball in the big leagues, and I was looking forward to playing again in those situations, especially with fans in it."
There's a counterfactual worth exploring, one where Acuña Jr. and Strider in particular are fully healthy for this series. However much distaste you and I might justifiably have for the Braves and their whole deal, brother, this would be a very sick and delightful matchup. I would not mind at all going Coherence mode and teleporting over to that corner of the multiverse, to watch several of the coolest players in the sport chop it up with playoff stakes, even just for a three-game series. Unfortunately, in our terrible shit-hole of a universe, the Braves team that slithered into the Wild Card is a shaggy, moldering abomination, a blasphemous mound of festering flesh positioned between the Padres and a delicious NLDS series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, to my mind one of the two or three best matchups possible in this postseason. The baseball-watching world deserves that showcase, and the Braves deserve mercy, delivered the way a farmer delivers mercy to a terminal barn cat. It is upon the Padres to send Atlanta rocketing into hell, where dead things belong.
