Braves Journal · Apr 2, 2021
Phillies 3, Braves 2, Innings 10
The Braves have only once played opening day game on the road on April Fool’s Day — a 2-1 opening day loss to the Astros in 1997, in which Shane Reynolds outdueled John Smoltz and a Chipper Jones homer plated the only run for the good guys. That team won 101 games and went on to win the World Series when Eric Gregg was sucked into the 9th dimension by a giant wormhole created by Stephen Hawking as a proof of concept just before he (Gregg, not Hawking) was slated to monitor the dish in Game 5 against the Marlins in the NLCS. That sentence shows just how bad I am at April Fool’s stuff, so I’ll stop right now. (It also shows how convoluted my sentences can be before I get into midseason form. But just stop and think how interesting it would have been to have Stephen Hawking as a home plate umpire.)