Right Down Peachtree

Did you catch the Braves-Marlins game yesterday? No? Well, that puts you in good company with all but about 600 people on the planet Earth. That's right, six hundred people showed up in Florida for an afternoon game of a team in a pennant race.

I have waited literally decades for this moment.

I never ever want to hear another word from anybody south of Tampa about how awful it is that the Braves fans don't support their team. The Braves never -- never -- drew just 600 fans, not even in the worst of the Ted Turner managing / ostrich-racing days of the '70s. And when the Braves actually were in the hunt, they outdrew yesterday's total by a factor of 30 even in the most desolate of times.  (2004, we're looking at you. And you're not pretty.)

Yes, there's plenty of other stuff going on, hurricanes and politics and whaddaya call it, "school" and stuff. But still -- 600? Weren't there more khakis-and-Oxford-shirt types looking to scoot out of work for an early-afternoon game? Or is everybody in Miami really an "independent contractor" and "import-export specialist"? FishStripes tries to defend the weak attendance -- and does a pretty decent job, actually -- but the truth of the matter is that FishStripes is chasing a losing cause here. Trust me, FS, I know what that's like. No matter how much you think the fans ought to be showing up, they won't.

Still, there's this -- if you're going to bail on a baseball game, it's a lot better to do it in Miami or Atlanta than Pittsburgh or Milwaukee.

Oh yeah, and in dog-bites-man news, the Braves lost. Again.

With the college football season kickoff just days (days!) away, let's start the blogosphere roundup of the Bulldog previews. Pretty much everybody is picking Georgia in their top two or three, but who's got them No. 1?

The Big Lead does. They begin by listing the negatives against Georgia -- six games against Top 25 teams, three road games against Top 15 ones -- but then note that in the smashmouth world of today's college football, losing a game might not be the end of the line. As long as that game isn't against Georgia Southern.

TBL points to one key point in the season, and it's not exactly a hidden gem:

Georgia’s landmark game is against Florida - win that, and the division should belong to Georgia; it likely will mean an SEC title game against LSU. But Mark Richt makes us a bit nervous. Nothing in particular - just don’t know if he can pull this off. At some point he’ll break through and pull off the National title. We just don’t know if it’s this year.

Overall, a favorable take. (No. 1 picks usually are.) Next, we'll check out some folks who aren't quite so in love with the red and black.

Peyton Manning! Ben Roethlisberger! Matt Ryan! All three of those guys have (or will) start at QB in their rookie seasons, and guess what -- two of the three took their teams to Super Bowl wins! Falcons fans, start getting that ticker tape ready!

...or not. The Falcons made the curious decision to start Matt Ryan at quarterback right off the bat, an idea that sounds stupid until you think about it -- at which point it sounds completely ridiculous. You need an offensive line the size of a battleship to protect a rookie quarterback, and Atlanta doesn't have that. You need receivers who can read, react, and adjust on an All-Pro level, and we're not sure if Atlanta has that. You need running backs who have the field awareness to turn into Secret Service bodyguards at a moment's notice, and Atlanta might -- just might -- have that. And you need a fanbase that's patient and willing to put up with mistakes ... well, yeah, we got that, all right.

So, what do we do now? We all wanted a change in quarterback, and now we've got one ... a bit sooner than most of us would've hoped. Why didn't they just throw the fans some red meat by starting ex-Jawja Dawg DJ Shockley for a few games? Matt Ryan's now on an express train to an early-career backup position in Philly or something.

(Oh, and be sure to check here for more Matt Ryan goodness.)

Preseason football ranks only above appendixes and Disney-band backing musicians in terms of disposability, forgettability and uselessness. But still, it is football, and we are (allegedly) a major-league city.

So get this. Tonight's Falcons game is being broadcast on tape-delay, starting two hours late. Why's it being tape-delayed, you ask? Surely it's got to be some major civic issue taking precedence--a mayoral debate, perhaps?  A state-of-the-city address? Heck, even a major matchup between high school football powers would be worth watching live, right?

Nope, nope, nope. The Atlanta Falcons game is being tape-delayed to run a broadcast of Jaws: The Revenge. Not even the original Jaws, which ruled. No, this movie was craptacular -- you know, unlike most fourth films in a franchise, which are always so top-rate.

 The AJC is making a big deal of the fact that this is Matt Ryan's first start, but I couldn't really care less about that. I'm not going to start getting excited about Ryan until the 2010 season. It's just the principle of the thing, you know? Preempting the NFL team for a halfwit two-decade-old movie that the stars don't even remember being in. Man alive.

On the scale of surprising news from this summer, this one has to rank just behind "Hawks make the playoffs." Get this: the Atlanta Braves have some of the most loyal fans in baseball.

Stop laughing. Why are you laughing? Stop laughing!

Forbes.com ran the numbers, calculating team attendance in both high and low periods, through winning streaks and losing droughts, breaking down...well, heck, let them tell you:

We calculated our rankings by measuring how tied attendance figures were to winning percentage since 1991, and we discounted expansion teams that have come along since. Through the use of multiple regression analysis, we determined how quickly fans supported the team when they started winning and how quickly they dissipated once performance slumped. The faster that fans boosted attendance and the more hastily they abandoned poor performance indicated fans who were less loyal.

We also controlled for new stadium construction and the boost it gives franchises, in order to avoid confusing the novelty of a new ball field for a bad season loyalty. Ticket prices were also controlled. If a team had to reduce prices during in order to maintain attendance, that’s not loyalty. But if a team jacked up ticket prices and brought in even more fans, it’s clear that the club has broad support.

Obviously, both Boston and Chicago rank high on the loyalty-o-meter; the fans there have turned masochistic loyalty into some kind of perverse badge of honor. But amazingly, the Braves ranked #3 on the list of fan loyalty, which says a lot for the depths of the franchise's support. Yeah, we're lackadaisical now, but then we've always been lackadaisical, even in the best of times. Go...Braves.

 Continuing our look at the many Braves games available on iTunes. This time around, the 1996 World Series, Game 6.

Avert your eyes, folks. Avert your eyes. The Mark Teixeira trade may have been the mortal blow to the Braves dynasty, but the fatal shot was fired right here twelve years earlier. (Well, not right here in this game; technically, it was Game 4.)

The Braves were a far more talented team than the Yankees, and for the first two games of the World Series -- which they won by a combined score of something like 693-3 -- they proved it. A kid named Andruw Jones came out of nowhere to hit two home runs in his first two World Series at-bats. The pitching was unhittable, the hitting unpitch-to-able. Everything appeared primed for the Braves to bust apart the Yankees and lay claim, at long last, to that elusive "dynasty" title.

And then. And then, and then, and then. The Braves dropped Game 3, but Game 4 was the killer. Up 6-0 in the sixth inning and cruising to what should have been a Series-ending run at home, the Braves let the Yankees back into it, capped by Jim Leyritz's three-run homer in the eighth. I destroyed an Ikea desk when that happened -- not exactly a feat of strength, but still -- and I'd imagine the collateral damage around Atlanta and the South was similar. You can't blame pitcher Mark Wohlers for hanging that slider; like Lonnie Smith five years earlier, the Braves had ample opportunities to make amends, and failed to do so every time. Atlanta lost three straight at home, the last three games played in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium -- what an opportunity missed, to close out that barn with a World Series title.

Atlanta hasn't won a World Series game since then, and Game 6 was, in an especially cruel note for the rest of America, the crowning of the new Yankee dynasty that would be forced down our throats for the next decade-plus. This one's tough to watch, knowing what's coming.

The Braves are on iTunes! Continuing our look back at famous Braves games now available for purchase at your local iTunes store. Today: the 1995 World Series, Game 6.

By 1995, the Braves were starting to wear on everybody outside Atlanta. (And y'all still had another ten years to hear from us! Deal with it!) The Montreal Expos were 1994's darlings, but they had a magical year obliterated by the strike. (So did the New York Yankees, who at the time hadn't been in the playoffs since 1981. The Yankees would win a few more games. The Expos would not.)

Anyway, the only thing that saved the Braves, public-image-wise, was that they were playing the Cleveland Indians, a horde of thugs who scared even Allen Iverson. Led by Albert Belle, who yelled at cameramen and female reporters back when Terrell Owens was still in middle school, the Indians were a fearsome lot, easily the best team the Braves had faced in the postseason to date.

No matter. Atlanta had blasted through Colorado in the first season of the division playoffs, and swept what was supposed to be a tough Reds team, and finally seemed to have figured out this World Series thing by the time they faced Cleveland. The Braves stepped on Cleveland's throat right from the start and never let up, and even when Cleveland rallied at home to close the game deficit to 3-2, there was nervousness but not resignation.

Back in Atlanta, the Braves were ready to roll in Game 6 when David Justice made his unfortunate--and completely accurate--comments about Atlanta's fans being a fickle lot. Justice has prostrated himself before Atlanta fans since then, begging for mercy, but the truth is, he was dead-on right. A topic for another day.

Anyway, Tom Glavine was on the hill for Atlanta that night. Baseball has a way of offering redemption, and this game was absolute proof of that. Glavine was still persona non grata in Atlanta because of his stance as a union representative. But between his eight-inning one-hitter and Justice's solo shot, there was an awful lot of healing going on in the Atlanta dugout that particular October night.

Mark Wohlers came on to close the ninth, and won the game in effect by keeping leadoff batter Kenny Lofton off the bases. Lofton had bedeviled the Braves all series, and if he'd gotten on first, he'd have stolen third so fast he could've scooted straight across the pitcher's mound. Two outs later, Carlos Baerga flied out to Marquis Grissom -- Baerga, incidentally, made the final out in three of the four Indians losses -- and the world championship was, at long last, Atlanta's. And surely, there would be more to follow, right? Right?

Tomorrow: Wrong. 1996.