The beginning of this baseball season has gone swimmingly for Phillies fans. They're an NL East-best 7-2 and just took a thrilling series at home against Shohei Ohtani and the defending champion Dodgers. Additionally, it's been a nightmare start for the Atlanta Braves. The divisional foe laughably began the season 0-7, which no playoff team has ever done, and then split a weekend set with the Marlins, leaving them at 1-8 so far in 2025.
The two teams will square off for three games this week down in Atlanta Cumberland, Ga. beginning Tuesday night. It's an all-world pitching matchup for the nationally televised affair, with the Braves' Chris Sale going up against the Phils' Zack Wheeler. Sale stole the NL Cy Young Award that Wheeler very much deserved last season, only adding some juice to this rivalry.
It does feel like a true rivalry again after the Phillies not being relevant at all before this current era of Fightins baseball and, really, this era itself began in earnest with the 2022 NLDS against Atlanta. Rhys Hoskins' bat spike reignited not just Citizens Bank Park that afternoon, but Philadelphia's love for the sport once more. Spencer Strider and the Braves are there to thank for that.
Before that, for my generation, I think back to the final day of the 2011 MLB season as the peak of the Phillies-Braves rivalry. The Phils had become the kings of the division after I had watched Atlanta win the NL East almost every single season of my entire life before that. On that night in September, the Phils helped eliminate the Braves from playoff contention while picking up their 102nd win of the year. It was essentially the last great moment of that Golden Age of Phillies baseball. Beating the Braves bookends the mid-late 2010s wasteland this team would eventually inhabit.
For older Phillies fans, of course, the 1993 NLCS that sent the Phils to the World Series stands tall as the defining moment for these teams before they even became division rivals. That team was iconic and taking down a perennial contender in Atlanta was paramount in that overall experience.
My disdain for the Braves grows with each word I write here. Sure, it's fun to say Atlanta stinks and their season is already over after their winless start to 2025, as I did in a column last week. That's the beauty of small sample sizes. Typically, I'm of the mindset that fans really shouldn't hyper-focus on win-loss records and the standings until early May, but if the Phillies can drop Atlanta into, say, a 2-10 hole this early with how talented their roster is, that's major for the Phils' hopes of repeating as NL East champs.
Hey, the games count the same in April as they do in September, right?
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