By: JJ Lanier

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

It’s always difficult talking about anyone or anything being the greatest when it comes to sports.

Everyone has different criteria they go by and comparing players or teams from different eras almost never ends well.

So, while I’m sure there will be baseball purists that will disagree with me, or to be honest just fans of a different team, my vote for the greatest starting pitching rotation has to be the 1995 Atlanta Braves.

Now, full disclosure I was a teenager at the time who thought Face/Off was the greatest movie ever made, so there’s a good possibility those baseball purists would be right.

Of course, when I mention the pitching rotation for the ‘95 Braves I’m really referring to three pitchers, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz.

You could argue, and I would probably make the argument, that Maddux was the best pitcher during the 90’s, with the ‘95 season being his best of the decade. Besides winning his fourth consecutive NL Cy Young award, Maddux’s 19-2 record was the best winning percentage of his career and his 1.63 ERA was bested only by the 1.56 he posted the year before.

Those stats, along with his ten complete games and three shutouts, were why I remember feeling Atlanta was going to win every time he took the mound.

I mean Maddux was so dominant that his 3-1 record and 2.62 ERA that postseason, a performance most pitchers would dream of, was actually a letdown compared to his regular season.

1995 may not have been Glavine’s most productive season, although he did finish 3rd in the Cy Young voting, but he was Atlanta’s best pitcher during the playoff run.

The Braves never lost a game that he started and he infamously told his teammates heading into Game 6 of the World Series all they had to do was give him one run and he would take care of the rest; they did and he threw eight innings of one hit, shutout baseball.

Maddux and Glavine may not have been the best one-two punch in baseball history, but if Rush is considered rock n’ roll’s holy triumvirate, then the Braves were baseball’s version with the addition of John Smoltz.

On most teams Smoltz would’ve been the number one starter, or number two, at the very least. Only on this Braves team would you have a pitcher that at that point was a three time All-Star, in the prime of his career, as the third man in the rotation.

Finishing out the rotation was Steve Avery, who was on the same trajectory as Tom Glavine before his career was derailed by injury, and Kent Merker, who was to this Braves team what Pete Best was to the Beatles.

I know this wasn’t the only year this group was together (Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz all made the All-Star team the following year) but as a collective, this seemed to be their best year.

When you think about it, there’s just something that feels right about the Braves winning their lone World Series title, while in Atlanta, during this season.

I’m sure there are other teams that have had three 1st ballot Hall of Fame pitchers on their roster at one time, but I doubt they all were in their prime.

It’s been twenty-five years and unlike the Nic Cage/John Travolta 90’s action flick, this group’s legacy has actually held up.