By: TJ Hartnett

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

So, in a rare moment of fortune for a professional sports team housed in Atlanta, I get to write the following sentence: the Atlanta Braves have won the first round on the 2020 MLB Playoffs and are moving on to face the Miami Marlins in a best-of-five set starting on Tuesday.

The reason it’s such a treat to write that sentence, and the reason it’s momentous despite maybe not seeming worthy of such pomp and circumstance, is because I wasn’t employed by The Southern Sports Edition the last time the Braves made it out of the first round.

In fact, I couldn’t be legally employed pretty much anywhere at the time because I was 13 years old.

That’s right, the Braves snapped a 10-series losing streak when the swept the Cincinnati Reds behind some stellar pitching performances from Max Fried, Ian Anderson, and the entire Atlanta bullpen, which shut the Reds down over 2 games and 22 innings.

But instead of dwelling on the past, let’s instead look to the upcoming Division Series against the all-too-familiar Marlins.

There’s good and bad in facing Miami.

The most obvious good being the Braves’ record against the Fish in 2020 was 6 wins against 4 losses.

Normally Atlanta would play Miami almost twice as much, but even in a much smaller sample size, Atlanta has the edge.

But there’s bad, too. The Miami pitching rotation, and particularly the starting trio of Sixto Sanchez, Pablo Lopez, and Sandy Alcantara, is very, very good.

With a two-game sweep of the favored Chicago Cubs, only Alcantara and Sanchez have made appearances so far, but both were excellent.

Alcantara allowed one run in 6 2/3 innings, and Sanchez shut the Cubbies out over 5.

They’ll go toe-to-toe with Fried and Anderson, with Kyle Wright likely in the mix for Atlanta.

The parallels are actually pretty fascinating.

Both rotations are young. Anderson and Sanchez are both rookies that debuted halfway through the season.

Lopez and Wright both debuted in 2018 and showed only flashes of what they can do before this season’s more consistent success (Wright’s is a much smaller sample size).

Alcantara and Fried have become their respective teams’ aces despite only solidifying their spots in the rotation last season.

Plus, Fried is the oldest of this sextet at the tender age of 26. That’s a lot of inexperience for a lot pitchers that these two teams are relying on.

The big difference between these two teams and the thing that likely haunts the Marlins’ dreams, is the offense.

The Marlins have one that is serviceable; the Braves have arguably the best bats in the league.

They proved that to Miami, beyond a shadow of a doubt, last month when they hung 29 runs, an NL record, on the Fish.

Granted, that offense was slow to wake up against Trevor Bauer and Luis Castillo last week. Scoring just 1 run off of that duo in 13 innings.

They came alive at the end of Game 2 and scored 4 runs in the eighth, which is a bad sign for Miami, but they looked bad enough during the rest of the series to question whether or not they’ve gone cold at the worst possible time.

But speculation is just guesswork, and we’ll get to put that all aside and see what happens.