In 1995, Major League Baseball changed its competition format, going to have six divisions and the Division Series debuted in the postseason. That year, the Atlanta Braves won their last World Series title.
It’s been 26 years of drought for the Braves, although they have not been really bad times as for other teams. No team has more divisional crowns since 1995 than Atlanta’s 15. Only the Yankees reached more World Series (7) than Atlanta (4) in this new format.
Atlanta at the time won 14 consecutive division titles, starting in 1991 and ending in 2005, but they came to have a curse in the playoffs, losing at the time nine consecutive series.
That bad streak ended last year though they stayed on the edge of the World Series by letting go of a 3-1 lead against the Dodgers. This year they managed to break this new barrier to seek to end Atlanta’s title drought.
The third and last ring of the Braves arrived in that 1995, in a series won in six games against Cleveland. They won by one run (3-2 and 4-3) the first two games at the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and lost the third in extra innings at Cleveland, before winning the fourth 5-2. They could not be crowned in someone else’s patio, but Tom Glavine won his second game of the series by shutting out 1-0 to the tribe to be proclaimed MVP and conquer the third and, to date, the last World Series of the Braves.
Atlanta reached two more Fall Classics in the next five years, but the Yankees got in the way: 4-2 in nineteen ninety six, when the Braves won the first two games at Yankees Stadium, but fell three in a row at home before leaving the crown in the Bronx. On 1999, there was no competition and they went by sweeps. That is where 21 years began without a trip to the Fall Classic.
They are 26 years without a title, the biggest drought in his period in Atlanta, since between Milwaukee and Boston they spent 37 years without winning from 1957 to 1995. And although it is more than a quarter of a century without a ring, it’s nowhere near the biggest droughts in Major League baseball.