The 2018 Atlanta Braves will be playing in the postseason. It’s been a few days since they clinched with a 5-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, and it’s still thrilling to type (and read) those words. This is what they played for. This is what we watched for. It’s not the apotheosis for the franchise as a whole, but it’s apotheosis enough for those of us that watched nearly every game with some combination of patience and gallows humor for the past three years — finally emerging from the rebuilding cellar, and not just as a crawl, but at a headlong dash-that-was-sometimes-a-tumble-and-sometimes-a-brilliant-sprint.
The regular season is and has been the regular season. It’s hard to argue that the Braves were “built” to win as many games as they did, but the players more or less said “nuts to that” and went ahead and smashed all sorts of expectations en route to their postseason berth. But, the playoffs are a different animal altogether.
Major league baseball, as a sports league, is kind of odd, if you think about it. Each team plays 162 games over six months, playing six or seven games a week. Teams can’t use all of their best players every game: pitchers are used in rotations, and bullpen fatigue is a real concern. Even position players sometimes need rest (and while it’s up for debate, it’s at least possible that perhaps teams aren’t currently resting their players as much as they should). As a result, each team’s season is a weird, multifarious thing — with 162 games, nine innings in each game, and over 6,000 PAs that the team participates on both the hitting and pitching sides (so 12,000 PAs total), there’s plenty of room for all sorts of statistical oddities to transpire and captivate the imagination. But that’s the beautiful thing about the baseball season: it’s long enough for most of these to fade away. “Give it time” is a good response to pretty much anything odd in baseball, and with the regular season, there’s plenty of it.
So, of course, after playing a 162-game season in which time is plentiful... the powers that be have decided that the reward for succeeding in this endeavor is a procession of short series, in which “give it time” is not remotely an acceptable course of action. Of course, it’s not like there’s another course of action that’s better — it’s just that for once, you’ve basically got the current series and that’s it. Lose the series, and sayonara. Win, and your reward is another. And then another. (And this is all before talking about the ludicrous Lightning Round game, basically a fevered dream of a contest when contrasted with the regular season.)
This is really my overall point. You know how your heart figuratively travels into your throat when the Braves are holding a slim lead late, and the bullpen is waffling in its ability to retire opposing baserunners? Imagine that in the playoffs. It’s absolutely terrifying, but it’s only terrifying because the two possible outcomes are so far apart: either something bad happens, and it’s awful, or something good happens, and it’s great, miraculous, legendary. In the regular season, the disparity between feelings is mitigated: even if something is awful, there’s always a tomorrow, up until September winds down, to rectify past mistakes. There are few tomorrows in the postseason... but the game the players are playing is still mostly the same once they have for six months previously.
The playoffs are going to be fun. They’re going to be amazing. Every single game, every single inning, is going to be a gift, no matter the score. This is no more true now than it was in March, when the Braves mounting a “2018 NL East champs” banner at SunTrust Park was wishful thinking. Enjoy it — and even if the results aren’t what you want — try your hardest anyway, because you don’t know when it’ll happen again. I hope I don’t need to exhort you further in this regard.
But, here’s where I think some resistance to temptation is helpful: please, please, please don’t read too much into it. If a player does badly in the playoffs, it isn’t because he’s young. Or inexperienced. Or is prone to fumble under pressure. Or is a “choker.” It’s not any of those — it’s because baseball is a game of protracted averages, basically an overwrought simulation of a bunch of weighted dice rolls — and while we all love it so, so much, there’s just nothing to be read in there. If the Braves lose 3-0 in the Division Series, it’s not because they were “overmatched” or whatever else, it’s because such a losing streak has already happened to this team 19 times this season (four-game losing streaks contain two three-game losing streaks for this calculation) and it’s just a baseball thing that happens. If a pitcher struggled, it’s because he struggled, as pitchers do — not because the playoffs “got to him” but because every pitcher struggles. If the bats go silent, well, we’ve seen that before many a time. If someone flubs a play, it’s a flubbed play — not wilting under October’s lights.
I wrote earlier this season that narrative is everything. As humans, we probably have a hard time discussing events without trying to mash them into some kind of recognizable pattern. The inherent variability of life isn’t comforting — it’s kind of a cold, scary thought. But the playoffs aren’t long or varied enough for recognizable patterns, just for the randomly-scattered results that occur when two baseball teams play a handful of games to determine who gets to go on and who gets to go home. So, whatever happens, just remember: the playoffs are great, but they’re also very dumb. This won’t stop me from knocking over furniture when great things happen, and it shouldn’t stop you either. But no matter what happens, the Braves have already won — they did that in the regular season, outperforming their competition vying for the same crown. This is just an extended victory lap, one with its own strange rules and twists on the established format. It’s going to be great, but don’t read more into than is there.
We’ll see you there, for all of the greatness, the dumbness, and everything in between.
(With a hat tip to Jets to Brazil and Blake Schwarzenbach for the song “Psalm.”)