Oct 03 2008
For Braves Nation, it’s an early winter
By Bud L. Ellis
braves.today.com
ATLANTA – Sitting in the Sports Garage – yes, it exists, good people, complete with old couch, old TV, a bunch of baseball memorabilia and a few old press passes from my newspaper days – and thinking about the moments I experienced out here the past six months.
It’s late on Thursday night. Too late to be up, actually, with work beckoning in a few hours and my weary bones worn out from a half-year of watching the Atlanta Braves stumble, bumble and limp through the worst season this franchise and its fan base has experienced since I was a junior in high school.
(Damn, that makes me feel old.)
We’re about to flip from Oct. 2 to Oct. 3, and the playoffs march along on my old 19-inch tube a few feet from my perch. Manny Ramirez is hitting homers, the Chicago Cubs are looking every bit cursed, and yet my focus remains on a team that gave up the playoff ghost back when the temperatures were still hot enough to require me flipping on the fan out here as I wrote up another Braves loss in the hours around midnight.
Boy, the Bravos put us through the wringer this season, didn’t they? Some of my friends and former colleagues have joked I should’ve waited until the team returned to contention before launching a daily Braves blog, a goal of mine I’ve had since the Internet and blogging took off a few years ago. But in retrospect, I’m glad I spent so much time this season writing about this team.
I was watching anyway. Fifteen years in the newspaper business, including some time spent covering the team I now blog about from my suburban garage, taught me a thing or two about writing baseball. And I’ve always loved this game … and this team, for that matter, no matter how poorly they played this season or how many times I wanted to take my computer and bash it across my forehead.
Surely, that would be less painful than subjecting myself to another blown lead by the bullpen, another member of the rotation landing on the DL, another boatload of runners left on base.
In looking back through the blog archives – and let me tell you, that’s much easier than thumbing through old sports sections in a filing cabinet – it occurred to me tonight that while the results may have been less than pleasant, the ride nonetheless was enjoyable. There remained a thrill of writing about the game, win or lose, of adding my insight and commentary and opinion – which always came from the heart – of racing to beat the clock … not to make a deadline dictated to me by a sports editor or a managing editor, but of getting the story done and posted before hitting the hay or before starting my work day before the sun rose the next morning.
It was fun, to say the least.
And now, it’s over. And it’s … well, it’s kinda weird. Granted, I won’t miss falling into bed and my wife asking the inevitable question: “They win?” We all know how I answered that question more often than not in 2008. But I do miss the ebb and flow of the baseball season.
It was my intention to begin the offseason coverage at Braves.Today.Com on Tuesday with a piece much like this one, straight from the heart, not so much analysis as an open letter to the readers of this sliver of cyberspace. If you’ve missed my sincere thanks and appreciation for your visits, your comments, your additions to this blog, then please accept my deepest gratitude for helping to grow this from just an idea to a blog that brought in nearly 4,000 visitors last month.
In the coming days, we’ll dive back into the look-back at 2008, marking some of the highs (yes, there were a few!) and the lows (can’t have the good without the bad). We’ll then jump into our player review series, looking at who may or may not be back with the Braves in 2009. I just felt the need to stop and reflect in today’s piece, if for nothing else than to exhale after six consecutive months of heavy breathing.
But baseball – and life – marches on. For those of us who follow the Braves, the hot stove already is warmed up. The playoffs may be on TV, but Braves Nation sits silent on this lonely evening, longing for the spring breezes and green grass of Lake Buena Vista.
The calendar says October. Baseball is on my television. But in every sense of the word, sitting here in the Sports Garage as midnight approaches, winter has arrived.
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