Braves’ Weiss Guy Becomes Hit Man

There is no telling who is going to show up at a postseason game.

As the Atlanta Braves took batting practice Tuesday night at Ted Turner Field, the man himself walked into the home team’s dugout.

Ted Turner, just in from some third world outpost or, perhaps, his penthouse apartment in Atlanta’s CNN building, shook hands with Brave General Manager John Schuerholz and congratulated him on “one more amazing and outstanding year.”

Now, the owner of the Braves added, “If we’re going to be the team of the ‘90s, we’ve got to win this series to shut everybody up. Otherwise, it’ll still be up in the air, I suppose.”

This is the way it is for the Braves every October.

Eight division titles in the ‘90s, but that familiar question of what have you done lately?

In the opener of the National League’s last championship series of the ‘90s, they took the first pivotal step toward providing an answer.

With the owner having delivered the mandate and the Braves hoping to underscore a decade of dominance with only their second World Series title, they beat the New York Mets, 4-2, on the strength of what has been their most dominating asset.

Greg Maddux gave up only one run in seven innings, and Mike Remlinger and John Rocker wrapped up a six-hit victory.

Three more and they eliminate the Mets, and it won’t matter who respects whom.

Four more after that and they eliminate the monkey, they shut everybody up as R.E. Turner III put it, they go out as World Series champs--no debate about it.

“It would be extra sweet to do it this year, for that reason and the fact that we’ve had so many key injuries and still won more games than any team in baseball and set a club record for runs,” first baseman Ryan Klesko said. “This is also a different team than those other teams in the ‘90s. Only three or four guys have been here for that whole period, so to put that burden [of only one World Series win] on all the new guys is unfair.

“I mean, we know what people say, that we haven’t done as much as we should have done, but it’s just nice to be here and to be playing good baseball, considering the people we lost this year. The one thing nobody can question is that this team has a lot of heart.”

The Braves lost Andres Galarraga and Javier Lopez from the middle of the batting order and Kerry Ligtenberg, Rudy Seanez and Odalis Perez from a pitching staff that still gets it done.

Maddux may have lost three of his last four regular-season starts and a shot at 20 wins, may have been hammered by the Mets for 11 hits in three innings of his last regular-season start, but he is 3-1 with a 1.18 earned-run average in opening games of playoff series--despite losing the division series opener to the Houston Astros while giving up only two runs in seven innings.

“It’s like taking a mulligan in golf,” he said. “It’s a new season. Nothing that happened in the past matters.”

Maddux beat the Mets with his golden arm and gold glove. He tied his own NLCS record with four assists, and his reflex catch of a seventh-inning line drive by Rey Ordonez may have saved him from a call to the paramedics, or in his words, “it was either catch it or let it hit me in the face.”

When it came to in-your-face, Rocker delivered. The animated Brave closer gave up an unearned run in the ninth inning but has six saves in eight appearances against the Mets this year and has not given up an earned run. He came running to the mound like a Pamplona bull when summoned--”We know the maniac’s on his way,” said Chipper Jones--and pumped his arm in characteristic fashion with the final out of the Braves’ 10th win in 13 games against the Mets this year and their 14th in the last 15 games at Turner Field.

Rocker couldn’t help but point out that dominance and again needle the Met manager as he said, “We’re 10-3 against them. I don’t see how Bobby Valentine can say anything. I mean, he keeps saying that we haven’t given the Mets any respect. Well, when is he going to give us some?”

In the game within the game, Valentine lost his opening duel with Bobby Cox. The Met manager called for a suicide squeeze in the third inning that pitcher Masato Yoshii blew, costing Valentine his runner from third base, and played the infield in in only the fifth inning of a 1-1 tie only to have Gerald Williams ground a tie-breaking single past the drawn-in Ordonez. Cox, by contrast, called for two sacrifices that led to two runs (the second executed by Eddie Perez after he had homered in his previous at-bat) and played a hunch by starting shortstop Walt Weiss over Jose Hernandez. Weiss doubled and singled twice.

The Braves won, although their Nos. 3, 4 and 5 hitters--Chipper Jones, Brian Jordan and Klesko--went hitless, with Jones drawing three walks in a determined effort by the Mets not to let him beat them, as he had in the three-game Atlanta sweep here during the next-to-last week of the season.

“They pitched me tough,” he said, “but we proved in the Houston series, as we did all season, that we’re not a one-man team. It was important that we stayed on top of them. I mean, considering how we’ve handled them all season, it would have been tough to swallow if we had lost.”

Valentine may not like that, may regard it as another display of disrespect, but he has bigger worries with Kevin Millwood, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz set to start the next three games for the Braves, and Ted Turner giving his team the word.