I recently read The Franchise: Atlanta Braves by Mark Bowman, who has been covering the Braves for MLB.com since 2001. Bowman is a good writer, and this book focuses heavily on what was going on–the teams and players–from his time on this beat. 

This is a quick read and a decent book for fans of the Atlanta Braves, especially those who started following them in the early 1990s. I have been following them since 1966, so there isn’t a lot of new material here for me. 

Most of the information that was new to me dealt with the team’s upper management beginning in the years after Ted Turner bought the Braves in 1976. It was interesting to read about how Terry McGuirk and Stan Kasten evolved from working for Turner in his media business and then transitioning to leadership roles with the Braves. 

I also was not aware that Frank Wren apparently spent his tenure as general manager alienating managers, coaches, and players. 

Bowman had an interesting take on why Turner hired Joe Torre as manager after the 1981 season. Bowman says, “Some TBS executives were looking for somebody who might be a better TV fit. This certainly helped Joe Torre, who had the looks and communication skills Turner and his folks were seeking.” Joe Torre had the looks for TV? Has Bowman ever has seen one of Torre’s baseball cards? 

The general style of the writing is that of someone who writes for digital media, so I found that a bit underwhelming. For instance, Bowman doesn’t use the Oxford, or serial, comma, which really isn’t ideal in historical writing. The style guide for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) calls for the Oxford comma, and that’s good enough for me. 

The book is really repetitive, with lots of the same information appearing in several different chapters. Early in the book, Bowman uses the same quotes multiple times, with only a few pages of separation. I think the reason for the repetitiveness is that the book is more like a collection of columns than it is a curated history.  

Bowman also could have benefited from a more thorough editor. I think that would have helped with the repeated quotes, but it also would have eliminated some of the awkward typos. There are a few instances where Bowman obviously edited sentences but left in some extra words from the previous version. 

There seems to be one glaring historical error in the book that actually contradicts something Bowman mentions in an earlier chapter. He says that when Freddie Freeman hit a home run off Josh Hader of the Milwaukee Brewers in the eighth inning of Game 4 of the 2021 National League Division Series, “He became the first Braves player to ever hit a go-ahead homer in the eighth inning or later of a postseason game.” This obviously is incorrect because, as Bowman mentions in an earlier chapter, Ed Mathews hit a walk-off, three-run homer in the 10th inning of Game 4 of the 1957 World Series. Maybe Bowman meant that Freeman was the first Atlanta Brave to do this, but when writing a book called The Franchise there really should be no distinction among the three cities the Braves played in when noting historical accomplishments. And if that were Bowman’s intent, he should have noted the difference. 

Despite all of this, I recommend the book because it is entertaining and will bring back lots of memories for Atlanta Braves fans. I tried to ignore the stylistic issues that really are likely due to me being an old-school reader.