Most of the season, it just seemed this wasn’t their year. They dropped their first four games, and soon injuries piled up. They lost their most dynamic player before the All-Star break. They were stuck below .500 in August. Yet out of nowhere, suddenly, these Atlanta Braves transformed themselves and took off. Jorge Soler, Freddie Freeman and the Braves breezed to their first World Series championship since 1995, hammering the Houston Astros 7-0 on Tuesday night in Game 6, the AP reports. “We hit every problem, every bump you could possibly hit this year,” Freeman said. “Injuries, every single kind of thing that could have happened, that could go wrong, went wrong, and we overcame every single one of those things.”
Max Fried threw six dominant innings in the signature pitching performance of the Series. Soler, a July acquisition who tested positive for COVID-19 in the playoffs, backed him early with a monster three-run shot for his third homer against the Astros. Freeman hit an RBI double and then punctuated the romp with a solo home run in the seventh that made it 7-0. By then, it was a total team effort. Steadied by 66-year-old manager Brian Snitker, an organization man for four decades, the underdog Braves won the franchise’s fourth title. “They never gave up on themselves,” he said on a postgame victory platform. “We lost a lot of pieces over the course of the summer and it was just the next man up."
Consider it a tribute to the greatest Braves player of them all, Mr. Hank Aaron. The Hall of Fame slugger died Jan. 22 at 86, still rooting for his old team, and his legacy was stamped all over this Series. And note the Braves outhomered the top-scoring team in the majors by 11-2. For 72-year-old Houston manager Dusty Baker, a disappointment. But for many fans still rooting against the Astros in the wake of their 2017 sign-stealing scandal, some satisfaction. Prior to this, no Atlanta team had won a title in the four major pro sports besides 1995. Now, all of baseball waits to see whether spring training is on deck in a little over three months. A squabble between owners and players threatens soon to shut down the sport.
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