I’ve been a Braves fan long enough to know the difference between a bad year and a broken organization. What I’m still working out is which one this is.

Spencer Strider is rehabbing his way back to a mound that nearly swallowed him whole. Everything in the pattern recognition says this ends one of two ways, and only one of them is good.

The 2021 Braves were 44-45 at the All-Star break and I had already mentally moved on. That was a mistake I’ve been making my whole life, and apparently baseball had to be the thing to finally break the habit.

I stopped hoping for a clean ninth inning somewhere around 2023. What replaced it was something more useful than hope.

Wins and losses are the language of sports, but they’ve never been the whole sentence. I’ve been a Falcons fan for decades, and I’ve learned to read between the lines.