A Streak of Good Streaks

By Tom Callahan

Of baseball's teams on a roll, Atlanta is the hottest

Casey Stengel, the New York Mets' first manager and "perfesser," once celebrated a two-game winning streak by donning a high silk hat and taking a carriage ride around Central Park. So streaks are relative. Which is more remarkable--that by the start of last weekend the Chicago White Sox had won eight games in a row or that the Baltimore Orioles had lost nine games in a row? That the Detroit Tigers took seven straight or that the Milwaukee Brewers dropped five straight? What's going on in baseball this season?

The San Diego Padres have actually won nine consecutive games. In the 14 years of the franchise, not once, not at any point, not in any season--never--has San Diego been so much as nine games over .500. Suddenly the Padres are winning games nine at a time. In making the most of their jubilation, the Padres infuriated the Los Angeles Dodgers, who at the same time happened to be losing six straight. Dodger Leftfielder Dusty Baker thought the San Diego hand-slapping (high fives, low fives) a little elaborate for April, and the teams waged a brief beanball war over this point of etiquette. When the dust settled, Los Angeles Manager Tommy Lasorda concluded that the entire affair was just something "prefabricated" by the media.

Managers' imaginations often come into play during streaks. Throughout the St. Louis Cardinals' eleven-game winning streak, Whitey Herzog's key strategy was to have Reserve Outfielder Dane lorg deliver the lineup card to the umpires. Meanwhile, Earl Weaver was tossing the Oriole clubhouse looking for his own lucky messenger to end the drought. ("Has Elrod Hendricks been out there yet?" Weaver moaned last week.)

But of all the streaks, the most surprising and exhilarating was Atlanta's. With their same old team and the Mets' old manager, Joe Torre, the Braves won their first 13 games of the season, two more than the modern major league record set by the Oakland A's just last year. "It's attitude, it's aggressiveness," Catcher Bruce Benedict says. "It's pitching," says First Baseman Chris Chambliss. However, a lot of people think it's Torre.

In the year of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, DiMaggio had a hit in every spring-training game. The principle was not lost on Torre, who wanted to win in Florida and acquaint the team with the sensation early. The Braves won twelve of their first 14 spring games, and now the players do not seem as amazed as the fans, who are flabbergasted. "I've never seen so much enthusiasm," Torre says. "And I was at the World Series with the '69 Mets, the team of destiny and all that."

Almost since the day it made off with Milwaukee's franchise in 1966, Atlanta has been one of the depressed areas of the major leagues. Though the first season brought out a million and a half customers, attendance had fallen to 534,672 by 1975. Then the entrepreneurial yachtsman Ted Turner took possession and began to ride ostriches and push baseballs (with his nose) around the base paths.

After a 16-game losing streak in 1977, Turner put on a uniform and relieved Manager Dave Bristol long enough to make it 17. Along the way, he signed a mess of unlikely free agents (Andy Messersmith, $1.75 million; Al Hrabosky, $5.9 million; Claudell Washington, $3.5 million). Last season's attendance was 535,418. To be sure, in Turner's time, the Braves have never finished any better than fourth in the National League's West Division.

If a baseball team could be said to exist for cable television, this is the one. In 1978 Turner asked Free Agent Pete Rose, native Cincinnatian to native Cincinnatian, if he would consider playing in Atlanta just long enough to help sell cable television, after which Turner would gladly return Rose to Cincinnati where they both knew he belonged. Supposedly because the letters M and h chafed him when he pitched. Messersmith had the name Channel stitched on his back over his number 17. Channel 17, Turner's "superstation."

In fact, when it came to hiring Torre, Joe's virtues may have been that he had a name and personality suitable to a regularly televised attraction and that his presence would guarantee the attention of the New York media. As the television cameras panned Atlantans waving "12" placards the night that the record was broken last week, there was much talk of Atlanta's sudden emergence as a baseball town, as if it had never been one before. When Joe Torre was just a plump kid of 13, his brother Frank was a slick-fielding first baseman for the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association (Double A). The Crackers took the pennant that year--and 15 other years too. Only the New York Yankees won more pennants, and no home team was better loved.

In picturesque Ponce de Leon Park, which seated 14,000, and where 12,000 patrons were regularly counted, there was a magnolia tree in center field. It was slightly out of range for everyone who ever hit there except Eddie Mathews, who had the only inside-the-tree home run. Major league teams barnstorming north from the spring camps always stopped off to play the Crackers. In 1947 Jackie Robinson first set foot out of Florida there, and 27,000 people overflowed the park. The Ku Klux Klan promised that someone would be shot. Nobody was.

Before Henry Aaron, you see, Atlanta's baseball memories were already lush and full. Hardly new to baseball or winning, Atlanta until now had just been having a bad streak.

--By Tom Callahan. Reported by Jamie Murphy/Atlanta

With reporting by Jamie Murphy

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