Lost season: Childhood's end for 50-year loyalist

Today is the merciful end of the most miserable season in Atlanta Braves history.

The only way this year in Atlanta baseball (it is still in Atlanta, right?) could end any more perfectly than with a drubbing by postseason-bound St. Louis -- led, naturally, by a 5-for-5, 6 RBI pounding courtesy of Atlantan and former Brave Jason Heyward -- would be a rainout.

The Braves have had worse seasons, of course, in terms of won-loss records. My attachment to this organization goes back to 1966, when they moved to Georgia from Milwaukee. There were some years in there when they were so bad and attendance so low you could practically call ahead and reserve a game time.

I'm kidding about that, but not about this: For a while, you could actually bring your own beer. No joke -- they didn't let you bring cans or bottles (nothing you could get drunk on and throw when the Braves were losing 12-2, as they often were), but you could ice down a plastic milk jug or two.

Those were the old Atlanta Stadium days. (Put the "Fulton County" part in yourself if you insist. I refuse to profane our first big-league venue that way, even posthumously.) The first time Dad drove around the curve on I-85 that brought it into view when it was brand new, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Going inside was sensory overload, with Eddie Matthews and Hank Aaron and Felipe Alou warming up in living color on green grass and brown infield dirt.

We didn't know in 1966 that the stadium was ugly. Neither did the folks with near-identical buildings in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. At least it wasn't a dome. (Atlanta would get around to building a dome much later, about the time the rest of the country had decided domes are stupid.)

Baseball-wise, with a couple of notable exceptions, the 30-odd years in Atlanta Stadium were godawful until the last few. There was 1969, when they won the division and then got swept by the Miracle Mets, and 1982, when they won it again and got swept by the Cardinals (after a first-game lead by Phil Niekro got rained out). And there was 1973, when three guys -- Aaron, Darrell Evans and Davey Johnson -- all had 40 or more homers and the team led the league in all kinds of offensive categories but still finished back in the pack because the only pitcher not throwing batting practice was Niekro.

For the most part, the Braves were just terrible. But here's the thing, and why this year is worse: Those teams, as pathetic as they were, had been put together by people who were actually trying to win. Braves badness of yesteryear was a matter of honest incompetence, not venal indifference.

Everybody remembers the magic of 1991 and the championship of 1995; and even with the long string of Red Sox-like postseason disappointments, the Braves gave us two decades of perennial contention. Atlanta got the Olympics and built an Olympic Stadium that was retrofitted into Turner Field -- not just a real baseball park named for a real person, but a great baseball park worthy of a really good baseball team.

The Braves are again a terrible baseball team, and Turner Field is still a great baseball park. Next year it will still be a great baseball park. The year after that it will be gone, and so will the Braves -- the former to the scrap heap and the latter to Cobb County. (Six of one . . .)

The "Atlanta" Braves will play in the 'burbs, in a new "complex" the organization named for a bank because the bank paid them to. I really don't know which is worse -- that sports venues now are all named for corporations, or that millions of people think there's nothing wrong with that.

I'll still watch the Braves, though not with the passion I've felt for so long. I might even go to a game or two eventually, if we sell enough stock to afford a ticket. It's baseball, and I'm addicted, and I'm weak.

Besides, people who knew little about baseball and cared even less have been leeching the game for 150 years and haven't bled it dry yet. Who knows? Maybe 25 years from now they'll bulldoze this thing, and somebody will get the idea to build the next new one and name it for an actual human being with some connection to baseball.

Maybe they'll even build it in Atlanta. Now there's an idea.

Dusty Nix, 706-571-8528; dnix@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published October 3, 2015 at 11:42 PM with the headline "Lost season: Childhood's end for 50-year loyalist ."