HOUSTON — Most of the season, it just seemed this wasn’t their year.
They dropped their first four games, and soon injuries piled up. They lost their most dynamic player before the All-Star break. They were stuck below .500 in August.
Yet out of nowhere, suddenly, these Atlanta Braves transformed themselves and took off.
Jorge Soler, Freddie Freeman and the Braves breezed to their first World Series championship since 1995, hammering the Houston Astros 7-0 on Tuesday night in Game 6. Max Fried threw six dominant innings in a signature pitching performance to close it out.
“We hit every pothole, every bump you could possibly hit this year,” Freeman said. “Injuries, every single kind of thing that could happen, that could go wrong went wrong, and we overcame every single one of those things.”
How proud The Hammer himself would’ve been.
Even so, Atlanta’s troubles never fully went away.
General manager Alex Anthopoulos, the architect of the Braves’ midseason turnaround, missed this crowning achievement after testing positive for COVID-19. He was back home for the clincher.