I am a die-hard Braves fan. Like most of you, I grew up in a time when division titles were a given and the real baseball began in October. I also grew up idolizing Chipper Jones and was fortunate enough to watch, in my opinion, the best overall third baseman of our generation on a nightly basis. I appreciated having Chipper's consistent presence and production in the lineup and felt a genuine bit of sadness as his career hit its twilight and close. It was something we as fans don't get to experience that often these days but I was grateful for every second of it.

My older brother is a die-hard Mets fan. He grew up in the late 1980s so it was understandable that a kid in Tennessee wasn't attracted to the close-by but dreadful Braves at that time but instead connected with Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. There's the usual pros and cons that accompany being family with fans of your biggest rivals. Your gloating is so much sweeter when you win and they're just feet away. Their gloating is so much louder in the unfortunate inverse. It creates an amazing dynamic that not only drives your passion for your team but draws you closer together and keeps you there. For our entire lives, we've been brothers and best friends. For 19 times a season, we're enemies.

Because we have had a close relationship, we've lived together or within a 5 minute drive of one another for the vast majority of our lives. This has meant that not only did we watch every Braves / Mets game together, I watched every other Mets game most seasons. Watching another team every night provides a different perspective that you really grow to appreciate. For one, Gary Cohen is my favorite play-by-play announcer in all of baseball. Just a genius in terms of baseball knowledge and a real professional in the way he calls a televised game (something we could use in the booth but I digress). Secondly, and the main point of why I'm writing this, is I have had a chance to watch the career of another franchise third baseman: David Wright.

Wright has always been comparable to Chipper in many ways, from being revered by the fans to being the cornerstone at the hot corner for years. David was always a guy I should've cheered against but just couldn't. Bryce Harper has made that easy at times. Ryan Howard made a career of it. But David was always different. I loved everything about the way he played and carried himself on and off the field. He was a fierce competitor that never showed up another player or team. He was out there every day and gave it everything he had, no matter where they were in the loss column. He was "Captain America" after the 2013 WBC for crying out loud. And he did all of this in New York. Playing under the greatest microscope in sports, he handled it better than you could ever dream of for a kid that came up at 21 and was immediately thrust into the brightest spotlight there is. It was truly impressive.

So yes, it feels weird writing a worship piece on a guy from one of our biggest rivals of the past two decades but as I have watched the coverage of Wright's final week and lead-up to his final game, I can't help but feel something. His press conference to announce his last home stand was heartbreaking. A guy that has had a large portion of his great career taken away from him by injuries is hanging up the cletes. He owns every major franchise record on offense except home runs, which he'll fall 10 shy of and would have surely broken. Even more than that, the sport is losing another superstar. When a new boom of young talent is doing things in this game that we've never seen before, we're still reminded that nothing lasts forever. The game needs more Javys and Acuñas and Harpers. We can always use a dozen more David Wrights.

So a tip of the cap to The Captain. He wasn't ours but an incredible career and immense contribution to the sport is hard to deny. Farewell, #5.