Back to the Beginning: Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Greg Maddux, and Tommy Hanson

When one is young, the world takes on the appearance of changing very little from year to year, until early adulthood experience can make everything appear to be an ever ascending arc, which really isn't an arc at all, but a line headed in a straight trajectory toward the sky. Michael Jordan leaps from the foul line and rises for eternity, tongue wagging. Brett Favre launches a pass for Sterling Sharpe that spirals into the Milky Way. The Braves rise out of the National League basement and never look back at the teams they pass on their rise, shattering glass ceiling after glass ceiling. These images were the Mount Rushmore of my childhood.

Of course, Jordan lost his leaping ability, as he transformed from an awe-inspiring stampede of athletic perfection into a wily magician, complete with top hat, wand, and a deck of cards; eventually, he disappeared from the court altogether. Brett Favre changed also, trading in his green and gold garb to become a desperate contestant on Daisy of Love, and the Braves fell out of first place, at times appearing unfamiliar even when one ventured inside the nostalgic confines of the ballpark to see them in person. All the while, I lost more hair, lost touch with friends, and saw my own athletic prowess begin to diminish--I'm not nearly as fast as I once was.

Nothing can go on forever exactly like it was, no matter how much Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other literary minds try and convince us that life is an ongoing circle, a family tree that forks, only to regroup violently and fuse back together through the incest of fate. However, life is not the complete opposite of coming full circle either. Rather it is a dense fog that becomes more hazy and clouded as we grow older and take in more and more memories, so we try and match the murkiness of the present with the more clear cut images of the past.

The picture I painted of myself as slow, balding, and friendless is much more pathetic than the life I actually lead. I feel, I have become more distinguished, well-rounded, and, while I miss the old friends, new ones have stepped in to take their places. Everything is not exactly as it was. My memories, solely by existing, tell me that everything is not the same, but everything is similar.

All year, the Braves' season has appeared to be a ship at sea, taking on water. Each hit and each defensive play that contributed to a victory took on the appearance of a ship's crew pitching water, in pails, back into the sea. Needless to say, the season's mood has been a constant flirtation with desperation. Then, the Braves took three out of four games from the Dodgers, while the Phillies dropped three in a row, and these victories, coincidentally, came in the same weekend that the Red Sox released former Brave John Smoltz. Smoltz's release came in the same year that the Braves released Tom Glavine, meaning that two out of the three most pivotal players of the Braves Golden Age were told bluntly, in the same year, that they no longer have what it takes to compete at this level.

Baseball can be a cruel sport. Jordan and Favre, in their respective sports, came to the conclusion they were done on their own terms, but baseball forced Smoltz and Glavine to accept this reality.

Glavine and his 305 career wins seemed so engrained in the Braves clubhouse and culture that even Braves fans took him for granted, and during his tenure with the Mets, many of us probably felt that he was still pitching for us and that we were just suffering from temporary color blindness, when viewing the colors of his jersey. Maddux, the Professor, and his Cy Young Awards seemed to get as much credit for what other pitchers on his team accomplished as he did for his own performances. Meanwhile, John Smoltz was always a crowd favorite because, out of the three, he was the fighter, the postseason battler, the matador. His obvious grit on the mound and his willingness to come out of the bullpen convinced Atlanta's fans that Smoltz cared as much about the Braves as we did, making his wearing of the Boston uniform so strange to behold.

Glavine still felt like a Brave, even when he wore a Mets jersey. Maddux had to go out on the road, like a traveling encyclopedia salesman; it would have been a sin for him not to have shared his baseball knowledge. And Smoltz's presence on another team this year was a declaration that his love for baseball was greater than his love for a franchise, which as a fan of the game is easy to forgive after such long years of service. But, in a year that saw two of these men released and the other's jersey retired at Turner Field, it seems strange to think that baseball is done with them, like the efforts to keep the ship afloat are all for not because keeping a ship afloat is constant work. The only permanence comes in letting the ship rest at the bottom of the sea. The game to game and year to year grind can make life appear to be a never-ending grind, a work shift with no closing whistle, or Marquez's never ending circle.

The Braves came out of the Dodgers series with new found hope, having picked up two games on the NL East leading Phillies, and they had a chance to gain more ground on the Phillies because the two teams begin a three game series tonight; however, two games awaited the Braves before the start of the Phillies matchup. The Braves have struggled all year with the Nationals, having gone 4-5 against Washington coming into this week, and the first game against in this series made it look like that struggle would continue.

In the first inning, the Nationals took a one run lead, and the Braves Tommy Hanson was on pace for over 120 pitches. Hanson wound up pitching 6.2 innings and striking out 9 batters to get the 8 to 1 victory. The Braves easily won the second game of the series, for the sweep, 6 to 2, but it was Hanson's battling through a tough first inning, like a surfer paddling out, that feels like the possible catalyst for any run the Braves might make in the NL East. In fact, the performance by the rookie, who is now 7-2, with a 3.05 ERA, resembled the tough performances of Braves pitchers past.

Following the weekend that forced a confession of impotence from John Smoltz, in the season that the Braves cut off the arm that once clinched them a World Series title, in the shadows of #31's honored jersey, a new pitching phenom is making a name for himself and possibly jump starting Atlanta's reconstruction. Do not think of it as a return to the past; there is no worst to first miracle taking place here, the franchise is not a laughing stock like it once was, the pitcher's name is Tommy not Tom, and (now that I'm older) these athletes are only men and not gods. But the similarities do draw eerily upon nostalgia, causing one to recall a time when a team transformed the impossible into the possible, as if they were alchemists. Now, in Atlanta, we expect the impossible to happen, which used to not be the case, and this expectation rears its head when Bobby Cox says things like, "He looks like he's been here for a while."

While his upward trajectory has clearly begun, the real question for Tommy Hanson now becomes how long is "a while." One can only hope his day is as long as the three suns who preceded him; after all, it takes a long time to become history's light, casting shadows on the present like some fisherman, standing on the shore.