Having spent more than six months watching this team, a level of cynicism was almost unavoidable. It would be all too easy to turn off this game after the first three innings, and say, “The hell with them, they were always going to lose that game,” throw the remote across the couch, and spend the next three months mad.

But it didn’t have to end this way, and it damn near didn’t.

Max Fried gave up four infield singles and got a nasty comebacker; a couple of inches and he’d have gotten out of this game with a much better line than two innings, five runs. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for him, as he now enters free agency knowing that this team is unlikely to tender him an offer anywhere near his market worth. He left the game with his team down 5-1, much like A.J. Smith-Shawver left yesterday’s contest with his team down 4-0.

But the bullpen held them there. The Atlanta bullpen pitched 12 2/3 innings in this series and allowed one run on three hits, with eight strikeouts and three walks. Had it not been for Fried and Smith-Shawver yielding eight runs in 3 1/3, things might have been otherwise.

Still, during a season in which the Braves offense had been so ravaged that the preseason World Series favorites nearly missed the playoffs, the team still won 89 games and secured a Wild Card spot because their pitching staff had the highest WAR in the majors, even despite Spencer Strider missing nearly the whole year. The starters failed last, only after all the other parts of the team had previously crumpled.

But if you had turned off the game in the third, you would have quit on a team that was still fighting, and doing so in the only way they knew how: flailing miserably until poking a couple of taters that brought them right back into the game. First Jorge Soler hit a solo shot in the fifth, and then Money Mike hit a two-run job in the eighth, his fifth hit of the series. He accounted for fully 38% of the Braves’ hits, 44% of the Braves’ total bases, and, with his double and homer in today’s losing effort, half of the team’s extra-base hits.

The team lost because its offense lacked cohesion, its starting rotation was a shambles, its bench depth was nil because the bench had long since been pressed into emergency service as the regulars went down injured, one by one.

And it’s impossible to ignore that the offense lacked cohesion in large part due to the strategy Alex Anthopoulos pursued at three key positions: catcher, shortstop, and first base. Arcia, Olson, and Murphy each had horrible years, and the team has some decisions to make.

In the meantime, our televisions are tuned to other channels. The Brewers knotted their series with the Mets. They and the Padres are the two teams who have never won a championship; the Tigers haven’t won in 40 years, and the Guardians haven’t won in three-quarters of a century. There are some fun rooting stories.

There will be a lot to say about Where Do We Go From Here? in the coming days. For now, this day is dark, and the cynicism about the team’s struggles was really just a protective armor to shield ourselves from the pain of watching a talented team underachieve for months of what should have been a much more successful summer.

But the last two weeks of the season, the team finally put together the winning streak we’d been pleading for all year, and they got their act together and chased and caught the Mets as the good Lord intended and won enough games to squeak into the playoffs and make today even possible. September was a hell of a lot more fun than the previous four months put together.

Today, our season came to an end, later than we’d feared, sooner than we’d hoped. The team had much more resilience than we gave them credit for, in our least charitable moments.

Tomorrow, we root for the undefeated 2025 Braves.

Good night, everybody.