Home of the Braves : The Last Time Atlanta Was This Excited Was 1864, and Sherman Was on His Way With a Torch

This town has some extra pep in its step, a bit more glide in its stride, additional dip in its hip, and it’s not just because of autumn’s brilliant skies and clean, cool air.

It’s the Braves, the team that wound up last season with the worst record in baseball, the team that in recent years has defined Atlanta as Losersville.

Losers no more, the Braves are tied with the Dodgers for the lead in the National League West, and Atlanta is beside itself with pride and joy and undeniable battiness.

People sit around television sports bars doing the “tomahawk chop” as the home team beats up on enemies. The fake tomahawks are everywhere. Huge ones decorate buildings, and the little foam-rubber hatchets are sold for $5 a copy, making children and grown-ups alike bizarrely happy and making the guy who thought up the idea rich.

While he has sold more than 100,000 foam tomahawks, the inventor, Paul Braddy, Thursday denied the rumor that he had shipped 40,000 to San Francisco for the Dodger-Giant series.

A few people have complained that the tomahawks and the team’s name insult American Indians. But those lonely protests have been drowned out by a massive chorus of war whoops.

It has gotten real strange, folks.

Kathy McCauley was dressing for work Thursday morning when her husband, Kevin, started doing a kind of Indian war dance around the bedroom. “He was whooping and hollering so much, the poor

cat freaked out and went under the bed,” Kathy said. “At first, I thought he’d been watching ‘Dances With Wolves’ again, but then I realized he’d just heard the baseball scores on the morning news.”

Braves won, Dodgers lost--teams tied.

Atlantans who used to greet one another with the age-old Southernism, “Hey!” now chant, “Go Braves” and “Beat L.A.” Radio stations publicize the San Francisco Giants’ and the Dodgers’ fax numbers, urging listeners to send ‘em a message.

Matt Fischer, public relations director for the Giants, said Atlantans sent about 1,000 before the machines were turned off. Many of the faxes, he said, were hung in the clubhouse. “Some of them were creative and some of them weren’t,” Fischer said.

At least one Atlanta radio personality, Steve McCoy of WSTR, has been sitting on a billboard for the last 15 days in a fashionable area of town called Buckhead, vowing to stay there until the Braves win the division or “until the fat lady sings,” according to a spokeswoman.

The craziness has even spread to Congress. Rep. Ben Jones (D-Ga.) took to the House floor Wednesday with a tomahawk and began chopping the air.

Jones has ridiculed Rep. Mel Levine (D-Calif.) as a “La-La Land Dodger yuppie.” As is traditional, a bet has been made on the championship: a bushel of Georgia pecans against a crate of oranges.

Old-timers around here have never seen anything like this Brave madness. The Hawks basketball team has made the playoffs, making hearts flutter a bit, but in traditional Atlanta style, the Hawks flopped and faded.

Once again, the city believes a championship is possible. This comes on top of Atlanta’s winning the host duties for the 1994 Super Bowl and the 1996 Olympic Games.

A winning sports team is “the glue that brings a city together,” said Frank Beltran, an Atlanta lawyer who has bought playoff and World Series tickets, splitting the $905 cost with his friend, Leonard Jenkins.

Beltran, like many Atlantans, says that the city needs to validate itself, to “prove to the world that we are winners. It goes all the way back to Sherman.” That would be William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who torched the city in 1864.

Several people said friends and associates in cities across America are rooting for the Braves, a team with some players who look more like junior high schoolers than seasoned pros, and others who get charged with drunk driving and suspended for using cocaine.

Does the team attract far-flung supporters because of its unlikely heroes, its fallibility? Are its weaknesses admired as Everyman traits?

Whatever the reason, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (banner headline in Thursday afternoon editions: It’s Title Time in Tomahawk Town) receive increasing numbers of telephone calls from fans around the region, editor Ron Martin said.

He said sportswriters hear “how people up in Kentucky who used to be (Cincinnati) Reds fans have become Brave fans.”

Beltran said he talked the other day with a lawyer in Indianapolis who said, “Everybody up here is watching the Braves.”

With three games left, fans have declared the season a success, regardless of what happens today, Saturday and Sunday. For the first time in years, many are looking forward to next year.

“I think it’ll be the continuation of something big,” Jenkins said.

Young Kye, greeting a customer in his dry-cleaning store, said: “Isn’t it exciting? It’s wonderful! The Braves are the most exciting, as far as sports teams go.”

Piet Bauwens, another customer, begged to differ. A native of Belgium, Bauwens recalled having gone to a Brave game with four lawyers. “They tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t understand any of it,” he said. “But I enjoyed the sausages.”

Times staff researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.