Opening Day is synonymous with hope. Before the season’s first pitches are fired toward home plate and the 162 games start slowly slipping away, hope is what sustains fans in need of their first baseball fix in nearly half a year.

Maybe the Cubs will break their ignominious championship drought. Maybe the Phillies, not the Mets, will trot out the best young rotation in baseball. Maybe the Braves won’t be as bad as their roster might have indicated in spring training. (Or, in that last case, maybe not.)

Hope springs eternal, as the saying goes, and that hope carries through March and into the first weeks of the season.

And then, sometimes, it crashes, headlong into the dirt alongside an accompanying plummet in the standings, amid a flurry of batting failures with runners in scoring position. Nothing—save an ACL tear or Tommy John scare for a top young player—can ruin spring hope quicker than a slump induced by a series of un-clutch at-bats.

Such is the case with this season’s New York Yankees, who …

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In 1991 the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins were linked as the first teams to play each other in the World Series after going from worst to first, that is, winning division titles after having finished in last place in their respective divisions the year before.

The Braves and the Twins linked themselves in this young season as well in a totally different way. Each team began the season losing its first nine games. Only once before in modern-day baseball (since 1900) had two teams lost their first nine games.

In 1988 the Braves and the Baltimore Orioles lost their first 10 games. The Braves won their 11th, but the Orioles lost an additional 11 games, staggering through their first 21 games altogether before beating the Chicago White Sox, 9-0, in No. 22 on April 29.

It seems highly unlikely that a team could lose its first 21 games, but …

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The farther John Schuerholz climbs the Atlanta Braves’ executive ladder the worse the Braves seem to get. Appearances, Schuerholz says, are deceiving.

Schuerholz was recently named vice chairman of the Braves, a promotion for the 75-year-old whose first job was teaching world geography, grammar, spelling, composition and literature to junior high school students.

Not many men – or women – have risen from eighth-grade teacher to vice chairman of a major company in a major industry, but Schuerholz has done it and has set the standard for the dozen general managers who are in their first seasons in their jobs.

Who among them will build an organization that will win 14 consecutive division championships, five National League pennants and a World Series, and that was after winning a World Series in the American League and before he schooled an assistant to …

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