Atlanta Braves Baseball - Sports for the Real Fan

I have to admit I was a little surprised to see that we had traded LaRoche for another reliever. I thought we were getting rid of him when we was finally beginning to show some consitency at 1st base. This may still end up being the case.

However, I began to think about the great Braves teams of the past that went to the World Series. All of these teams had one thing in common: great pitching! Any Braves fan that suffered through this past season spent a lot of time swearing at our bull pen. The bull pen blew 6 saves for John Smolt alone! He would have been the Cy Yound winner with those wins.

These two new pitchers also add a lot of depth and flexibility for Bobby Cox. He has three guys that could probably all be in the closer role.

There are many reasons to be excited about the coming season but the bull pen improvement is definetely a big one.

The Atlanta Braves are a Major League Baseball team, based in Atlanta, Georgia since 1966. The team competes in the Eastern Division of the National League. The Braves won their division for 11 consecutive years beginning with 1995 and ending in 2005; this streak is the longest in any professional North American sport. The Braves have won 16 divisional titles, nine National League pennants, and three World Series championships (1914, 1957, and 1995).

1870-1913
The Cincinnati Base Ball Club, sponsor of the first professional baseball team in 1869, voted to dissolve after the 1870 season. Cincinnati Red Stockings player-manager Harry Wright then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, with brother George and two other Cincinnati players to form the nucleus of the Boston Red Stockings, a charter member of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. The original Red Stockings team can lay claim to being the oldest continuously playing team in all of professional sports; the only other team that has been organized for as long, the Chicago Cubs, did not play for the two years following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Two young players hired away from the Forest City club of Rockford, Illinois, turned out to be the biggest stars during the NAPBBP years: pitcher Al Spalding and second baseman Ross Barnes. Hence, the Braves are the oldest continuously operating franchise in Major League History.

Led by the Wright brothers, Barnes, and Spalding, the Red Stockings dominated the National Association, winning four of that league's five championships. The team became one of the National League's charter franchises in 1876, sometimes called the "Red Caps" (as a new Cincinnati Red Stockings club was another charter member). Boston came to be called the Beaneaters in 1883, while retaining red as team colors.

Although somewhat stripped of talent in the National League's inaugural year, Boston bounced back to win the 1877 and 1878 pennants. The Red Caps/Beaneaters were one of the league's dominant teams during the 19th century, winning a total of eight pennants. For most of that time, their manager was Frank Selee, the first manager not to double as a player as well. The 1898 team finished 102-47, a club record for wins that would stand for almost a century.

The team, however, was decimated when the American League's new Boston entry set up shop in 1901. Many of the Beaneaters' stars jumped to the new team, which offered contracts that the Beaneaters' owners didn't even bother to match. They only managed one winning season from 1900 to 1913, and lost 100 games five times. In 1906, the Beaneaters (temporarily) eliminated the last bit of red from their stockings because their manager thought the red dye could cause wounds to become infected. The American League club's owner, Charles Taylor, wasted little time in changing his team's name to the Red Sox, in place of the generic "Americans". Nickname chang