Most of the season, it just seemed this wasn’t their year. They dropped their first four games, and soon injuries piled up. They lost their most dynamic player before the All-Star break. They were stuck below .500 in August. Yet out of nowhere, suddenly, these Atlanta Braves transformed themselves and took off.
Jorge Soler, Freddie Freeman and the Braves breezed to their first World Series championship since 1995, hammering the Houston Astros 7-0 on Tuesday night in Game 6. Max Fried threw six dominant innings in a signature pitching performance to close it out.
“We hit every pothole, every bump you could possibly hit this year,” Freeman said. “Injuries, every single kind of thing that could happen, that could go wrong went wrong, and we overcame every single one of those things.”
“This is the toughest team I’ve ever been a part of,” said shortstop Dansby Swanson, who also homered. Swanson previously hit a game-tying home run in the seventh inning of the team’s Game four win against the Houston Astros on Saturday.
The 27-year-old, who was formerly with the Arizona Diamondbacks, joined the Braves in 2015.
“I’m just so thankful to be here,” he explained. “I really can’t say it enough. Getting traded over here, at the time I didn’t understand it. But God’s always got a plan and if I’ve learned one thing is having faith in that plan will never fail you. It’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.”
Swanson has been open about his Christian faith as well as his battle for mental health. During an interview earlier this year on the Sports Spectrum Podcast, he recalled having a panic attack that left him “paralyzed” with fear.
He started working with a mental wellness coach and created a healthy habit of focusing on important things to help calm him down. Little did he know it would lead him down a spiritual path toward recover. He started spending more time in Scripture and eventually started a Bible study with the Braves team chaplain, Terry Evans.
“I really started to feel like I was connecting more with myself, which in turn was connecting me more with God,” Swanson said. “He’s made us all in a certain way and made us to be who we’re supposed to be. I felt like after I started to do that consistently, I really was embracing who He had made me to be.”
He encourages everyone to get closer to God by spending more time in His presence.
“If anything, the lesson that I’ve learned was that you can’t go wrong trusting and growing closer to God,” Swanson noted. “Whatever way that works for you is what works for you. But spend time with God. Legitimately spend time in the words that He wrote through people that were on this earth. Spend time in prayer and meditation and silence. Do these things to grow near to Him.”
He added, “I really started to feel His presence more, and I really started to feel more comfortable with the callings and stuff that He’s put on my heart.”