Cayden Williams | The Long Wait the 2021 Braves Finally Ended
Cayden Williams Roswell
The Atlanta Braves won the World Series in 2021. For most fans of most teams, that sentence is a normal celebration. For Atlanta fans, the sentence is more loaded than that. Cayden Williams of Roswell has been a Braves fan long enough to remember why 2021 hit so hard.
The team had been waiting twenty-six years.
The 1995 ring and the long shadow
The Braves won their last World Series before 2021 in 1995. The team beat the Cleveland Indians in six games. Tom Glavine pitched a one-hitter into the eighth inning of the closeout game. The whole city celebrated like a city that thought this was just the beginning.
It was not the beginning. The Braves spent the rest of the 1990s making the playoffs every year and losing. The 1996 team was favored to repeat and lost to the Yankees. The 1999 team made the World Series and got swept by the Yankees. The other postseasons mostly ended in division series losses.
By the early 2000s, the pattern was set. Atlanta would dominate the regular season and find a way to lose in October. The fan base learned to brace for it.
The lost decade
The Braves' postseason streak ended in 2005. From 2006 to 2009, the team missed the playoffs entirely. The roster turnover was constant. Bobby Cox retired after the 2010 season. The Hall of Fame core that defined the 1990s was gone.
The 2010s were a rebuild followed by a brief contention window followed by another rebuild. The team made the playoffs a few times. They never got past the division series. The pattern that started in the 1990s kept repeating itself in shorter cycles.
Atlanta fans of a certain age started to believe the team would never win another title in their lifetime.
What 2021 actually looked like
The 2021 Braves were not the best team in baseball. They were under .500 in early August. Ronald Acuña Jr., the team's franchise player, tore his ACL in July and missed the rest of the season.
Then the front office made a series of trade deadline moves that almost no one liked at the time. Joc Pederson. Eddie Rosario. Jorge Soler. Adam Duvall. The four outfielders the Braves traded for at the deadline became the new core.
The team got hot in August and September. They won the division by a thin margin. Then they did what no Braves team had done in twenty-six years. They won every postseason series they played.
The moments that defined the run
The home run by Eddie Rosario that capped the National League Championship Series. Jorge Soler's three-run shot in Game 6 of the World Series. Freddie Freeman's home run in the same game that put the win out of reach.
Williams remembers where he was for the closeout game. So does every Atlanta fan over the age of forty. The wait was long enough that the celebration felt different from the way other championship celebrations feel for other cities.
This was a relief. A reward for sticking around. A vindication of staying through the lost decade.
What it changed for Atlanta
The 2021 ring did something to the Braves' identity that the 1995 ring never quite finished. The 1995 team was supposed to be the start of a dynasty and never delivered. The 2021 team broke a curse that had been hanging over the franchise.
The kids in Atlanta now will grow up with the Braves as a winning team. The team has stayed competitive. Acuña came back. The young pitching has held. The window is open.
Williams is at the games. He has a different relationship with the team now than he did in 2010. The waiting is over. The next title would still be celebrated. It would not have the same weight.
That weight only attached to one championship. Cayden Williams of Roswell, also known as C.J. Williams, will tell you 2021 was the one that mattered, and 2021 will always be the one that mattered, no matter what else the team does in the years to come.