World Series 2021 – Atlanta’s Baby Braves are all grown up –

ATLANTA — The narrative shape of the 2021 Atlanta Braves, the newly crowned champions of baseball, was not an arc, as fantastical tales tend to be. It was more like a wave chart, with ebbs and flows leading to one final tidal wave that began gathering momentum in early August and crashed ashore on Tuesday night.

Over the last three incredible months, the Braves went from a team that had not spent a day over .500 to World Series champions.

That, in itself, is a good story. But the story didn’t begin in August, or at a July trade deadline that Atlanta turned into a season-defining event, or on the day its biggest star, Ronald Acuña Jr., went down for the season, or even in spring training. It began decades ago in 1977, when Brian Snitker, a 22-year-old catcher-first baseman from Macon, Illinois, via the University of New Orleans, joined the organization. It would be a short stint as a player, but a lifetime stint as a Brave.

In many ways, Snitker was just a boy when he joined the Atlanta organization. And in the days before he reached the pinnacle of his profession at age 66, Snitker talked frankly about the joy with which he and his club pursued the biggest prize in the sport.

“I’ve always said the team that has that little boy in them are teams that do good in the postseason,” said Snitker, Atlanta’s manager since 2016. “And I really believe that. I think the team that just plays with emotion and enjoys what they’re doing in the postseason is really dangerous.”

When the final out was made in Game 6, and the Braves mobbed each other in a writhing, euphoric pile at Houston’s Minute Maid Park, the event signified so much for the current iteration of the Braves organization, the long history of a franchise with roots in 19th century Boston, and for their home city of Atlanta, which has been disappointed so many times in so many high-stakes games that it has self-identified as a cursed sports town.

More than anything, it signified that a team that burst into contention…