Written By Daniel Wright
I woke up on Thursday, October 28, and went to a Journalism club meeting. I came home, did homework, watched YouTube, played guitar, and then ate dinner. As I sat at the dinner table talking with my family, I got a FaceTime call from my lifelong friend, the one and only Aidan Browne (the kid on the right in that picture up there). I’ve known Aidan for 16 years (longer than my memory shows me). We played baseball together from the ages of 6-12. We’ve spent every Super Bowl Sunday together for over a decade, we’ve spent hundreds of hours playing Minecraft and Stardew Valley together, and we have had countless sleepovers and birthdays together. We have a ton of things in common, but right now, the biggest thing that we have in common is our undying, never-ending, and constantly painful love for the Atlanta Braves. That Thursday was Aidan’s birthday and he was given tickets to the World Series Game 4. He told me on FaceTime that he was going. I was so excited for him. Then things hit a different level. He told me, “Yeah, I got two tickets to the Braves game on Saturday. So my dad told me I get to go and take a friend also. So, you wanna go to the World Series with me?” My reaction was oddly calm. I just put my hand over my shocked face then told him to tell my mom what he told me. She flipped out. My dad and brothers flipped out. I was stunned.
Without our common love for the Braves, we’d still be great friends. But all the experiences and memories we have made through baseball, from little league games in Grayson and Monroe to random Atlanta and Gwinnett Braves games to all the painful and exciting memories of playoff runs past, have given us an unshakeable bond. If you know me, you know how much sports mean to me, and knowing that, it makes sense why those memories are so important to me. Many of my most cherished memories involve Aidan, and there is no one else I would rather have shared this experience with. Baseball is a sport like no other, one that millions of people love. One that can make you love or despise the person in the chair next to you. One that can bring you oh so high...and then crush you down with one swing of a bat. For me, baseball truly is the only sport that can connect me to someone as closely as it has with Aidan. It’s the sport that binds people together. Aidan, I know you’ll probably never read this, but thanks for the experience of a lifetime, homie.
So, yeah, anyway, I went to the World Series. That was really cool. The Braves were down until the bottom of the 7th when Dansby Swanson and Jorge Soler went yard in back to back at-bats to put the Braves up 3-2 and give them the win after Will Smith pitched a scoreless 9th. That put the Braves up 3-1 in the series. We all know what happened after that. (Just FYI, I have no idea what happens after that. At the time of writing this, it’s the top of the 5th in Game 5. The Braves are up 5-4 with AJ Minter about to throw pitch number 16. Hopefully, that was a good “we all know” and not a Falcons style “we all know.” Fingers crossed and Go Braves.) For now, enjoy some of my favorite pictures that I took at the game.
