The ghosts are back.
The 2022 Atlanta Braves won 101 games, had the Cy Young runner-up in lefty Max Fried, the NL Rookie of the Year in Michael Harris II and the runner-up in Spencer Strider, a 20-game winner in Kyle Wright, and three different MVP vote-getters.
They lost in their first postseason matchup.
The 2023 Braves were even better: a generational offense, the first team in MLB history to slug over .500, and one that tied the all-time home run record with 307. A Cy Young finalist who won 20 games and led baseball in strikeouts and winning percentage. The NL Most Valuable Player in Ronald Acuña Jr., who shattered the 40/40 club by going 40/70. Eight All-Stars, including the entire starting infield, and five MVP vote-getters.
They too lost in their first postseason matchup.
The team that beat them both times was the Philadelphia Phillies. Truist Park was the site of two postseason series where the Braves entered as the better regular-season team and still watched Philly celebrate as Atlanta’s season ended.
There are easier ways for the Braves to finish September. They could play somebody random. Somebody with no emotional baggage attached to them. Somebody who hasn’t spent two Octobers turning Truist Park quiet.
Instead, Philadelphia is coming back.
Let’s talk about it.
This isn’t the same Phillies team
The 2022 and 2023 Phillies were among the league’s most fearsome teams. Their offense was powered by Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper, backed by a fully in-his-prime JT Realmuto behind the plate and star free agent Trea Turner (in 2023).
The pitching staff was anchored by Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, supported by young talents like Ranger Suarez, Cristopher Sanchez, and Taijuan Walker.
This isn’t that Phillies team.
Several of the names are the same - Schwarber and Harper and Wheeler, most notably - but they’re the only ones still performing. Realmuto is 35 and dealing with the wear and tear that comes with 12,000 career innings behind the plate. Turner is mired in the worst season of his career, with an OPS that starts with a “6” and a negative Fielding Run Value. Nola’s coming off a career-worst season due to injury and shows his age at times, losing the zone or the ability to miss bats for entire stretches.
This isn’t the dangerous Phillies team that dispatched the Braves in two straight postseasons, silencing Truist Park with homers and turning Citizens Bank Park into a celebration as they marched toward a World Series.
This is the last gasp of a dying dynasty that never was.
A collection of highly paid stars that repeatedly got close, never finished the job, and burned through much of the farm system trying.
Which is precisely why the pressure isn’t on them.
The pressure has flipped to Atlanta
Philadelphia can arrive at Truist with almost nothing to prove psychologically.
Atlanta does.
Because if the Braves are the better team now, if Philly is diminished, if this is finally the version Atlanta is supposed to beat...
then losing to them again becomes much harder to explain away.
In 2022, the Braves ran into a hot team, one that marched all the way to the World Series.
In 2023, Philadelphia matched up exceptionally well with Atlanta and shut down their generational offense over a four-game series.
But losing a third time, to a weaker Phillies club than either of the teams that eliminated you, starts looking less like variance and more like a problem with Atlanta.
Whatever you want to call the previous two eliminations - matchups, execution, variance, a cold streak, or the randomness of October baseball - the Braves have an opportunity this week to make them history instead of baggage.
Why this week matters even though it isn’t October
“But Lindsay, the Braves went 9-4 against the Phillies this season. They handled them, easily.”
That’s true. But regular season games don’t exorcise postseason demons.
Going 4-3 against Philly in September doesn’t erase Bryce Harper’s stare-down or the silence that followed another NLDS elimination. The only way to fully exorcise those ghosts is to beat the Phillies in the postseason, when it’s do-or-die.
This is where Atlanta can start the healing process.
Welcome Philadelphia into Truist Park, and beat them. Don’t let a struggling Phillies team, one that needed five opportunities to win the one game that would lock them into the last Wild Card spot, suddenly look like a contender again.
Don’t give them oxygen.
Make this week look like the relationship has changed. They won two consecutive division titles. Make sure that’s the last thing this version of the Phillies gets to celebrate. Re-establish that your biggest rival right now is not the wrong-side-of-the-aging-curve stars in Philadelphia, or the mercenaries in New York; it’s the teams that are perennially the best in baseball, the ones that actually compete for championships, like the Dodgers and the Brewers.
You don’t have to kill a ghost in September. But you can stop feeding it.
This is the kind of series a serious postseason threat handles
Philadelphia enters this Wild Card round depleted, as they had to push to the limit just to make it into the field. They started Aaron Nola on only two days’ rest Saturday, and then needed ace Zack Wheeler to throw 97 pitches on Sunday and starter Jesús Luzardo to pitch an inning of relief. They have been the worst offense in baseball in September, hitting an MLB-worst 17 home runs in the month and carrying the league’s 2nd-worst OPS.
They went through a heavyweight bout of their own making just to get here, and they’re barely standing at the moment.
Sweep the leg.
Philadelphia is limping toward the end of its window. That doesn’t make this easier for Atlanta.
It makes it more important.
Because the Braves don’t need another reminder of what the Phillies once were. They need to make sure what happened in 2022 and 2023 doesn’t control what happens next.
The ghosts are coming back to Truist Park.
Atlanta doesn’t have to be afraid of them.
But it does have to beat them.