And here's the hour special on the World Series.
And here's the hour special on the World Series.
That's right...spurned us for Colorado at the last minute as I recall. ARod incident really stung JS. He hasn't dealt with a Boras client seriously since. He has traded for a couple but let them walk soon after.
But, that really just boiled down to JS being sloppy during the back half of his tenure.
It's like those plaques with the team photos. "National League Champion" no longer carried the same catchet after finally winning it all. After being a laughingstock during the late 80's, it was enough just to get there in '91. So, losing wasn't an enormous disappointment. In '92-'93, it got to the point of "just win the damn thing" because the "Buffalo Bills of baseball" talk was getting louder.
For whatever reason I was obsessed with Mike Hampton, and thought that Schuerholz had pulled off the trade of the century when he acquired him a few years later from the Rockies via the Marlins for Tim Spooneybarger. Colorado and Miami paid for something like 75% of his salary and the deal seemed to come at a perfect time during an offseason when the Braves were faced with a potentially major SP shortage.
Obviously, we know how well all of that turned out. Still think Hampton would have been a solid acquisition had Coors not screwed up his arm.
I don't remember reading that much about how incredibly close the Braves were in their pursuit of Rodriguez until later on, but it's fun to imagine how absurd the team would have been in the middle of the order in 2001 with Chipper, Andruw, Javy, and A-Rod.
Last edited by Hawk; 04-25-2015 at 10:32 PM.
The highlight film from '84:
gamecock4braves (04-26-2015), Hawk (04-27-2015), TomahawkCult (04-26-2015)
Champ Summers charging across the diamond toward Pascual Perez in the Braves dugout, only to be stopped by Bob Horner, was 'rasslin level zaniness.
I still have that VHS tape. I watched it so many times, but somehow it still works.
'You don't know what you've got until it's gone' is so true. I knew growing up that I was watching something that would likely never be repeated, and I was watching and hearing in real time amazingly talented men call those games. I loved every second of it. The thing about being so young though, I never really thought about what it would be like when those voices went silent or those teams were no more. Just kind of thing naively it'll last forever.
I miss those Braves days, and I miss Skip and Pete even more. None of it's been the same for me since Skip passed, especially.
That fan in the yellow pants, what a beast.