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1995 Atlanta Braves

The 1995 Atlanta Braves Avert History’s Harsh Verdict

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The Atlanta Braves had come up short in the World Series in 1991 and 1992, then been upset in the National League Championship Series in 1993, before their likely playoff berth of 1994 was ended by the players’ strike. The 1995 Atlanta Braves spared the franchise and the fan base from the ignominy of constant playoff defeat by winning the World Series.

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Pitching was the reason the team won, as they led the National League in ERA. No one was better than Greg Maddux, who went a surreal 19-2 with a 1.63 ERA and won the Cy Young Award. Tom Glavine and John Smoltz combined to win 28 games and each had an ERA in the low 3s.

Offensively, left fielder Ryan Klesko had a big year, slugging .608, while first baseman Fred McGriff hit .280 with 27 home runs. They led an offense that was good enough to help the pitching carry the team to a 90-54 record (the season was shortened to 144 games after the strike of 1994 spilled over into the early part of the following season). Atlanta blew the NL East wide open, winning the division by 21 games.

In the postseason, the Braves kept finding ways to win games late. They got to a 2-0 series leads in the Division Series against the Colorado Rockies and then over the Cincinnati Reds and their MVP shortstop Barry Larkin in the League Championship Series. It was winning in either the ninth or in extra innings that keyed Atlanta’s quick stranglehold on their first two playoff series.

The clutch gene paved the way for Atlanta eventually dispatching Colorado in four games, in the best-of-five Division Series. The Braves then completed a four-game sweep of the Reds in the NLCS thanks to series MVP Mike Devereaux, and his .357 on-base percentage and .615 slugging percentage over the four games.

It set Atlanta up for a World Series confrontation against the powerful offense of the Cleveland Indians, with Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome leading the way.

The adage that good pitching beats good hitting held true in this case. Atlanta’s staff kept Cleveland’s lineup under reasonable control, Cleveland had no stopper who could match Atlanta’s Big Three and the Braves won three of the first five games. They had two chances at home to close out what would be the franchise’s first championship since relocating to Atlanta.

Glavine took everything into his own hands, and delivered a masterful outing in Game 6. A solo home run by David Justice was all Glavine needed to produce a 1-0 win that gave his team its long-sought World Series title and himself the honor of Series MVP.

Atlanta would continue to be a fixture in the postseason, winning the NL East every year through 2006, an astonishing display of a divisional dynasty. But they never got back to the top. The 1995 Atlanta Braves were the edition that made sure the franchise at least got on the board once.

1995 Sports: Dynasties Built, Developed, Validated & Restored

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The year that was 1995 sports was one of the dynasty. All of the six major team championships—the Final Four, the Stanley Cup, the NBA Finals, the World Series, the college football title and the Super Bowl—had dynastic overtones to it. In some cases, the dynasty was known at the time, in other cases we know it from the perspective of history, in still others it was an old dynasty coming to life, but it looms over every single championship run.

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We knew at the time that the Dallas Cowboys were aiming for dynasty status. They had won the Super Bowl in 1992 and 1993 and reached the NFC Championship Game in 1994. One of the big sports stories of the year was the highly publicized pursuit of free agent cornerback Deion Sanders by owner Jerry Jones.
The acquisition of Deion gave the Cowboys the extra piece they needed to win a third Super Bowl in four years and earn dynasty status.
Read more about the 1995 Dallas Cowboys
The Nebraska Cornhuskers were already one of college football’s top programs, and a long-awaited national championship in 1994 had gotten the monkey off the back of their coach, Tom Osborne. It turns out, Osborne was just getting started. The 1995 edition of Nebraska football was one of the great college teams of all time. They won a repeat title and two years later, the Cornhuskers also completed a three crowns-in-four years run that earned them the dynasty tag.
Read more about 1995 Nebraska football
The period of NBA basketball from 1991 to 1998 was defined by Michael Jordan, with one notable exception—the interlude when he went to play minor league baseball. The Houston Rockets won the championship in the Jordan-less year of 1994. And though MJ returned in 1995, it was late in the regular season.
Houston again won a title and solidified themselves as the top alternative to the Jordan Bulls. And speaking of those Bulls…after Michael’s return, he played a marquee playoff series against the Orlando Magic of Shaquille O’Neal and came up short. It would be the last time Jordan came up short, as his own dynasty was back on track.
Read more about the 1995 Houston Rockets
Read more about the 1995 MJ-Shaq Playoff Battle
No dynasty ever dominated its sport the way the UCLA basketball program did under John Wooden, with their ten national championships from 1964-75. The dominance was so thorough, that an entire era of college basketball history is defined by its conclusion, and it serves as the marking point for where the modern era of the NCAA Tournament really begins.
But UCLA had never cut down the nets since Wooden’s departure. 1995 finally changed that. With Ed O’Bannon leading the way, the Bruins beat defending national champion Arkansas and UCLA was back atop the college basketball world.
Read more about 1995 UCLA basketball
I suppose it’s debatable whether the New Jersey Devils are a dynasty, and they certainly weren’t perceived as such when the 1995 Stanley Cup playoffs began. But what’s indisputable is that the Devils were embarking on an era where they would become one of the NHL’s great franchises—over the next nine years they would make the Finals four times and hoist the Cup on three of those occasions.
The first one came in 1995 when they upset the Detroit Red Wings in a shocking Stanley Cup Finals. It was the last shocker in a postseason that began when the Western Conference saw three first-round series go to Game 7s, and two of the top three seeds eliminated in them.
Read more about the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals
Finally, we come to the Atlanta Braves. Over the previous four years they had won two pennants, made three NLCS, and were in position to at least go back to the postseason in 1994 before the strike wiped out everything. In future years, they would continue to win NL East titles—every year through 2005—and win two more pennants.
But in only one of those years would they win a World Series and that was in 1995. Without this championship, Atlanta would have lived in sports infamy (I don’t condone that line of thinking, I’m merely acknowledging its reality). The Series they won in 1995 at least provided some inoculation against harsh judgment and validated their long dynastic run through the National League in general, and the Eastern Division in particular.
Atlanta’s World Series victory over the Cleveland Indians was cathartic for the franchise, but nothing was more cathartic for baseball fans—still wounded after the strike of 1994—then the excitement provided by the Seattle Mariners. The M’s staged a dramatic late-season comeback to win the AL West, and then one more dramatic comeback to upend the New York Yankees in a thrilling Division Series.
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Read more about the 1995 Seattle Mariners