re: 2021 Atlanta Braves are your World Series Champions True Team Effort

He's had good stuff all series. Snit pulled him for "the matchup" earlier in series for Luke, which also forced Luke to come back out the next inning. It nearly cost us that game. The numbers don't tell the story when someone is hitting spots with nasty stuff. You have a known commodity on the mound and you go to the pen for an unknown.



Edit: Was game 2.
Matzek walks Mookie on 10 pitch ab. Strikes out next 2. They put will Smith on and brought in Jackson from the pen. I was really pissed about that decision making. You know Matzek is pounding the zone at this point and locating his offspeed. You don't know what youre going to get from Luke with runners on since burying this pitches could allow Mookie to take 3rd so he leaves one up that hits Turner. Now a pass ball can score a run so he leaves it up and a base hit scored 2 and he's burned for the next inning.

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I know it won’t happen, but I wouldn’t carry Luke Jackson on the World Series roster. He’s mentally shaken and throwing pitches with zero conviction. He’s a waste of a roster spot and it would be malpractice to run him out there in any late inning pressure situation in the WS.

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I honestly 100% understand that perspective, but I actually think he has a chance to be a lot better against a team that isn’t the Dodgers. He did an interview after the win last night and mentioned that they’ve owned him… I think it got in his head a little.
Maybe I’m just being hopeful, but I see him getting some of his reliability back with a new opponent.

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Lots of Braves fans used to trash Liberty Media. The reality all along has been that Liberty Media has been more than willing to spend the money necessary to acquire and keep talent and build a championship team.

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That's not how the Liberty/Braves relationship works. Liberty has no active role in running the Braves. Terry McGuirk runs the Braves. Their budget is based on their revenue. Payroll has been up since the move because attendance is up and the Battery has been very profitable, not because Liberty is spending big. Unless something has changed recently Liberty would likely be running afoul of the SEC and IRS if they put money into the Braves, and afoul of MLB if they drained money from the Braves.

Footage of Matzek walking around ATL after the celebration Saturday night:

42,000 + in the stadium. 1000's more at the Battery. It'll be highly congested Friday/Saturday/possibly Sunday for good reason. Fans wanting to be near, around the excitement going on with this team.

Once again, I'll have dueling tv's going come Saturday night.
Braves/Astros on the 52 inch.
Ole Miss/Auburn on the 32 inch.
Been a phenomenal fall sports season.

couldn't get tix either, too expensive for me anyway which stinks, oh well.

This is cool below, letter from Joc:

Getting traded sucks.

Like, I won’t lie — I wasn’t looking to leave Chicago. I enjoyed playing for the Cubs, enjoyed the city, enjoyed Wrigley….. plus I’d already changed teams last offseason. I wasn’t exactly dying to do it twice in a year. So when I saw Jed’s name pop up on my caller I.D. over the All-Star break, my heart kind of sank a little. We’d been losing, and I’d heard the same rumors as everyone else — that the Cubs were going to be sellers.

Turns out the rumors were true. Jed thanked me for my time with the club, and told me that the Braves had come after me hard. So they were moving me to Atlanta.

Atlanta??? Man, I was pretty surprised. At the time, the Braves were a game under .500. They were third in the division — 4½ back. And they’d just lost Acuña, an MVP–caliber player, for the rest of the season. In my mind, I was thinking, you know, No offense.… but shouldn’t these guys be sellers, too?? I actually remember one of the first things that somebody said to me when I got there: “Don’t get too comfortable.”

Translation: If things don’t turn around, you might be getting traded all over again.

Slowly but surely, though….. things turned around.

It wasn’t anything crazy at first. No huge winning streak out of the gate. No dramatic changes. It wasn’t like in the movies where the music hits and the team just rips off a bunch of W’s, can’t do anything wrong. It was more of a gradual thing, you know what I mean? It’s like at some point we just started winning a little more than we were losing.

And then it’s funny — I remember about a month after the trade, we’re a few games over .500 and on a long road trip. And I was playing cards on the plane with some of the pitchers. The plane ride ended, and then from there it’s like, the team has two buses: one for pitchers and one for position players. I wanted to keep playing cards with those guys, though — so I hopped in with them instead. And we’re on the bus, playing cards, talking trash, you know….. when at some point someone asks me, “Wait. Why are you on the pitchers bus?” And I wasn’t really even thinking about it. We were just having a good time, I guess, and I was in one of those moods.

But I said: “Because y’all are the motherf*ckers who are going to win us a World Series.”

I think we won like six games in a row after that.

And I’m bringing that story up, not because I’m trying to say that that’s what jump-started all of this. Obviously not. We’re here because this is one hell of a baseball team — and guys have been playing great when it’s mattered most.

But I also think, in terms of looking at success, that sometimes some of the “other stuff” can be underrated.
Like…. baseball seasons are long, man. They’re a serious grind. Things can get stale. And I think over the course of a long season, it’s stuff like culture, like swagger, like vibes, like whatever you want to call it — it’s stuff like that that can actually make a pretty big difference. Stuff like that can get everybody’s energy right.

And if there’s one thing that I think I’ve been able to bring to this team, beyond just my bat and my glove, I’d say it’s that energy — and that belief: That nothing is as dangerous in baseball as a team with a ton of confidence.

Y’all are the motherf*ckers who are going to win us a World Series.Joc Pederson

I’ll give you another example real quick. So we’re in L.A. for a series near the end of the summer — and my wife has this great stylist there who comes to the house to do hers and the kids’ hair. And since I’m around, the stylist asks if I want to do anything with mine. I probably would have just said no.… but then I remember something.

So, back when I was in Chicago, Rizzo had this idea: that halfway through the year, we needed to go blonde. “Trust me, good things happen when you go blonde.” Not sure if he fact-checked that, or where it came from, but he’d always be saying it. Then I got traded, though, and he did too, so it never happened. But now flash-forward — it’s late August, I’m kind of grinding, not hitting like I should be….. and I remember the blonde thing with Rizzo. So I’m like, alright — why not. I tell my wife’s hair stylist, “Let’s switch it up.” Went blonde.

The guys in the bullpen saw it, and had my walk-up song changed to “The Real Slim Shady.” The fans caught on to it, and of course did their thing. The whole team got a kick out of it. And then also….. it kind of worked???

Very next game, I hit a home run off Buehler.

Rizzo texts me right after, thrilled — as if I proved his theory, and we discovered a major breakthrough in science or something. And I’m not saying we did…...

But at the same time: It really has just been that kind of season, man.

Like, it’s been an incredible run — game in, game out. It’s been so many different guys stepping up in so many different moments. It’s been us getting MVP–type seasons from Albies and Riley. It’s been Soler legitimately carrying us for stretches. It’s been Freddie taking Hader deep to send us to the NLCS. It’s been Adrianza coming through with that pinch-hit double.… then Eddie hitting the bomb that changed everything. It’s been Matzek, in an elimination game, giving us two of the most ridiculous shutdown innings you’ll ever see. It’s been Will slamming the door on some of the best lineups in baseball. It’s been Dansby flashing the glove to get that final out. It’s been the entire pitching staff, frankly.

It’s been championship-level baseball, up and down the roster.

But when I look back on these last few months, and when I look ahead to this World Series in front of us — what stands out to me, just as much, is the little things.

What stands out to me is the stuff that you can’t see in a box score.

It’s the front office believing in this group just crazily enough to be buyers at the trade deadline with a team that was under .500. It’s our security guys coming up to me during my very first batting practice, and saying how glad they were to have me on board. It’s Ian Anderson convincing me to change my walk-up music to “Way 2 Sexy,” and then promising, “It’s gonna bang.” It’s the white pearls becoming….. whatever the white pearls have become (shoutout to Gabe, my jeweler). It’s “Wine Club,” this thing that me and a few guys have started, where after each big playoff win we’ll crack open a new bottle. It’s Poppy, my three-year-old daughter, running out onto the field after we clinched the pennant and letting me know, “Dada, the Braves won! You played good defense!” It’s a couple of former teammates I’m really close to, coming up to me postgame and saying, “Hey — I love you. Now go beat the Astros for us.” And it’s the city of Atlanta, being absolutely electric, every single night at Truist, and matching our energy when we’ve needed it most.

Alright….. that’s about all I’ve got.

Obviously I don’t know what’s coming next — it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen over these next four, five, six, seven games.

I like our chances, though.

Because, yeah — we might not be a superteam. We might have only won 88 games. We might have had our share of injuries, and slipped below some people’s radars, and taken an unconventional path to get to this stage.

But we also just might be those motherf*ckers.

And no one’s beat us yet.

Not "pussing" out, and I hope the team has an unfinished business attitude after last seasons Heartbreaker vs the Dodgers... BUT, I am genuinely just happy to get back at this point and to have pieced together consecutive deep post-season runs. Winning would be icing on an already pretty tasty cake for me

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BUT, I am genuinely just happy to get back at this point

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This is the attitude everyone should have. What the Braves have done and are doing is an extremely rare thing, so just being in the World Series alone is such a cool thing. Having said that let's go booty root the Astros.