In the summer of his first year as general manager of the Atlanta Falcons, Thomas Dimitroff called John Schuerholz, who had recently been promoted to president of the Atlanta Braves after having served 17 years as their general manager. Dimitroff was not looking for tickets to a Braves game.

The 42-year-old rookie general manager was seeking wisdom from the master, the man who constructed teams that won an unparalleled 14 consecutive division championships.

“It was when he first joined the organization,” Schuerholz recalled last week, speaking by telephone from what is now the vice chairman’s office. “He wanted to find out what made our organization tick and succeed as consistently as we did.”

Schuerholz, who has since become a Hall of Fame executive, invited Dimitroff to a game.

“He sat with me at a game,” Schuerholz related. “When the calendar ticked off a couple of months, I sat with him at a Falcons game and we talked about those things we did and how we went about it. I shared with Thomas the things we did.

“Thomas is steeped in football through his work and his dad’s work, and now the Falcons are on the brink of doing something no other professional team has done in Atlanta other than the Braves, and that’s win a world championship. I don’t want to jinx them but from what I’ve seen I think they’re the best team in football. The defense wasn’t so much that way for much of the year, but they’ve improved the defense. Rookies are contributing like veterans. Their offense is almost unstoppable by anybody.”

The Falcons won only 4 games and lost 12 the season before Dimitroff was hired and talked with Schuerholz. They needed all the help they could get. Schuerholz, however, is not claiming credit for the Falcons’ rise to this year’s Super Bowl against the New England Patriots. But the Braves’ executive demonstrated his knowledge of football.

(For the first half of the Super Bowl Sunday night and the first half of the third quarter, Schuerholz’s assessment of the Falcons was right on target as they took a 28-3 lead. But the Patriots rallied for five consecutive scores and a pair of two-point conversions, snatching a 34-28 victory in overtime.

As general manager of the Braves and before them the Kansas City Royals, Schuerholz said, “We drafted Archie Manning, Steve Bartkowski, John Elway, Dan Marino, Bo Jackson, Mark DeRosa and acquired Deion Sanders and Brian Jordan. When our scouts said these great athletes are capable of being baseball players, we went for them.”

The Falcons have had a checkered history. In the 15 years during which the Braves won 14 consecutive division titles (there were no division titles in the strike year of 1994), the Falcons won two division titles and three wild-card berths. In the other nine seasons, they had losing records.

Their most successful spurt came under Dimitroff when they went to the playoffs in three successive seasons, 2010-2012, winning two division titles and the wild-card slot in the playoffs in between. In the post-season, though, they lost to Green Bay (48-21), the New York Giants (24-2) and San Francisco (28-24).

They lost to Denver (34-19) in their lone Super Bowl appearance following the 1998 season.

Dimitroff wasn’t in Atlanta for the Braves’ remarkable run of division championships and he didn’t witness first-hand their inability to win more than one World Series (1995). Some critics felt their failure to win more than one World Series detracted from their division-title success, but I wasn’t one of them.

The playoffs have become a grind and a challenge all in themselves. They are a season in themselves. If a team is fortunate to advance to the World Series, it still isn’t assured of winning. It can lose on a fluke hit, a bad-bounce grounder, a pitch that misses its intended target by an inch or two.

My view of the Braves’ situation was had they had Mariano Rivera as their closer, they, and not the Yankees, could have won multiple World Series. Schuerholz shrugged off the criticism.

“My view of that criticism has been the same since the very beginning,” Schuerholz said. “That usually was offered by people who didn’t spend very much time around our organization, did not see the quality of the people in it, whether it was the major league manager or the scouts or the player development people or even the guys on the major league roster playing the games so consistently well that they managed to win 14 consecutive division championships. Last time I checked no one has done that in any sport.

“That is the basic requirement; having your pipeline continually matriculate major league-championship caliber players, have them in the hands of a great manager, a Hall of Fame manager, and hard-working brilliant, excellent coaches, good doctors and trainers. We did that on a continual basis. One could say that was a stroke of luck, that it was a shot in the dark. It wasn’t anything like that.

“It was a well constructed, well planned, well executed management of an organization. To me, that makes the criticism from those folks easy to shut off. If you look at our team during that period of time there were at least three or four world championships we were in that we could have won, two or three that we should have won. I wish that had happened for two reasons – the quality of players who wore our uniform that played those 14 years and in the five championship series and in the five World Series deserve not to have the last sentence talking about the greatness of the Atlanta Braves end with the word ‘but.’”

As in “but they won only one World Series.”

“I view it as frustrating,” Schuerholz said.

On the other hand, there is this:

“When owners or presidents or general managers would come into Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and stand behind the batting cage with me and look up at the pennants we had strung up on the outfield wall and they grew and grew until they reached 14 consecutive and they said you can’t do that; it’s impossible to do that in our sport, especially because of the number of games we play, the grueling grinding impact of the schedule, the challenge of managing your salary roster, the whimsical nature of the injuries that occur to key players. You can’t do what you guys have done.

“But we did it. What we didn’t do was win more World Series. If we had won one more World Series, it would have erased the word ‘but’ from the end of the last sentence of the review of how great the Atlanta Braves were during that period of time.”

In 26 years with the Braves, Schuerholz has gone from general manager to president to vice chairman, a relatively new position.

“My biggest challenge in life right now,” he said of his new job, “is to talk to experts, ask questions, do as much research as possible and find out what does a vice chairman do. Here’s what I know so far. You end up with a beautiful nice new office in a new ball park, and I continue to go to owners meetings with our chairman and CEO.”

THE MANFRED METRICS

(The following was inadvertently omitted from last week’s column)

In Rob Manfred’s two years as commissioner, clubs have hired or promoted a total of 28 men for positions of managers, general managers, heads of baseball operations and club presidents. As a reflection of Manfred’s failure to convince or encourage clubs to hire minorities, these are the results of those moves:

• White American Males     26
• Blacks                                     1
• Latinos                                   1