
My favorite game of the rebuild was August 7th, 2015.
The Atlanta Braves lost 361 times in four seasons, have had plenty of good memories to supplant those losses in the two years since, and one specific game from the very worst of those seasons stands out all this time later.
What is wrong with me?
It was the 43–66 Miami Marlins at Turner Field to take on the 49–60 Braves. The Braves were 7–18 in their last 25 games, and the Marlins were rocking a 2–11 stretch heading into play that Friday at the Ted.
And Freddie Freeman — the only watchable Braves position player by this point — was out of the lineup. It was one of those games where you sit down, look around, and just go “Why the hell am I here?”

Look at that. Why the hell *was* I there?
Then the game started, and I remembered baseball is still baseball, records be damned. You don’t have to have the most talent on the field or the highest leverage situation to enjoy it.
Nobody personified this better than Julio Teheran.
This game sticks out to me all these years later because of Julio. He was matched up with the late Jose Fernandez, and traded zeroes with him. Once Julio started dealing, it was easy to forget how bad these teams were and just get lost in a baseball game.
He started the night with six shutout innings, and the Braves won the game 6–3. For one night, it didn’t matter that the franchise was in the midst of their worst season since 1990 and they were a million miles away from being remotely adequate. The ace of the pitching staff shut down a divisional opponent on what was a fun Friday night at the ballpark.
That was Teheran during the rebuild in a nutshell.
Teheran was an All-Star in 2014 before the season fell apart in the second half. He took a bit of a step back in 2015, but still made 33 starts on a 95-loss team and had his moments. Then in 2016 he was an All-Star again. And not just an “every team needs one representative” All-Star. A guy who had a 2.46 ERA in his first 16 starts even though his team had a 27–52 record at that point.
Teheran went six strong innings in the last Opening Day at Turner Field. He bookended the year by throwing seven shutout frames and beating Justin Verlander in the final game in the old ballpark.
The whole time, he was the hope. Lines like “When we get good, we’ll have our ace!” and “It’s going to be awesome when he’s still doing this for the winning teams.” were regular nomenclature in Braves Country.
The problem with that is baseball just doesn’t care about your feelings.
The Braves came out of the rebuilding tunnel very young and very good, but it was too late for Teheran. The moment was gone.
The fastball velocity dipped below 90. His home run rate soared. Those starts where he couldn’t get through three innings went from about once a season to once a month. He went from the only guy in the rotation you could trust for an ounce of joy in a bad season to the one you wanted to keep as far away from the mound as possible in crunch time.
He peaked when the Braves were in the middle of their worst run since the 80s, and then was already going down the mountain when things finally started to turn around.
He did get to pitch for the 2019 Braves in the playoffs, but it wasn’t *that* Julio we all fell in love with. He was a shell of his former self — and as fate would have it — he was the one on the mound when the Cardinals walked it off in game four.
The Braves had a revolving door of terrible pitchers from 2014–2017, and the one mainstay who guided it through for us had to take the knockout punch with everyone watching.
It was just another cruel reminder that timing is rarely what you want it to be in this life.
It applies to a lot of other baseball examples. Charlie Culberson could’ve been injured at any point this season and still had time to make a recovery, but he had to get hit in the face by a fastball with two weeks left in the season and miss October. He had his Teheran moment. The Braves played 1,528 innings in 2019, and they waited for the deciding game of the NLDS to drop a 10-run stink bomb. That’s Julio’s career.
One of the chilling realities tethered to heavily investing yourself in sports is you see a lot of yourself and your problems in them. You feel a connection to players or coaches, and in a way it feels like their success is your success.
Teheran’s career arc in Atlanta is a metaphor that extends well beyond baseball.
If you’ve ever had to turn down that dream job in another city because it just didn’t quite line up with events happening in your personal life, you are Julio. If you’re a senior in college who finally found a group of friends you enjoy being around just in time to graduate and leave campus, that’s a re-enactment of Teheran’s 2019.
We say we want sports to be an escape from our daily life, but in reality, they are just an amplification of it. What happens on the field can reflect our lives in more ways than we think, or would care to admit.
Even if you didn’t love Teheran, it’s tough to see it end like this. If anyone deserved to be at his best on a contending team, it was him. How many times did he take the mound in front of 15,000 people on a muggy July Tuesday or an irrelevant August Friday? How many people have similar stories to mine, about how a Teheran start was their beacon of light in years of baseball darkness?
But again, there’s no such thing as deserving. Or at least, the universe doesn’t care who deserves what. Sometimes you can pour all your life into trying to save a sinking ship, only to not be able to help guide it when it’s finally above water.
That’s baseball. That’s life. That’s Julio Teheran.