Brav-o

 This guy out there on the bump, we've seen him before. He's mowing down the Houston Astros in the biggest start of his life -- six innings, four hits, six Ks, zero runs -- and, yeah, now we recognize him, now he's taking us right back to the summer of 2013, when he was out there on the bump in downtown Fort Wayne.

Max Fried went 6-7 that summer for the Fort Wayne TinCaps, with a 3.49 ERA. He was 19 years old. By the next summer, the San Diego Padres judged him the top pitching prospect in their system.

Last night, he became something else: A guy with a World Series ring.

Slapped a padlock on the muscular Astros' bat rack, Fried did, and Series MVP Jorge Soler gave him all the cushion he needed with a three-run bomb, and the Atlanta Braves, who were Nowheresville as late as the first of August, shut out the 'Stros 7-0 to win the World Series in six games.

It was a fairy-tale finish to a hell of a fairy tale, period, considering the Braves won only 88 games this season and lost their biggest star, Ronald Acuna Jr., to a season-ending injury in early July. But the rest of the young Braves' core picked up the slack, and GM Alex Anthopoulos swung some deals at the trade deadline that brought in Soler and Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall and Joc Pederson, and the Braves wound up winning 36 of their last 55 games.

Then they knocked off the Brewers in the NLDS and the Dodgers in the NLCS -- a team that had won 18 more games during the regular season.

And then ... 

Well, then they took care of the favored Astros, behind Fried and Soler and veteran Freddie Freeman, and that gifted and exuberant young core. Oh, and also behind a 66-year-old manager who spent 40 years riding buses as a minor-league skipper before finally reaching the big chair in 2016.

Brian Snitker came to the Braves organization as a 22-year-old catcher/first baseman and never left, a baseball lifer well-versed in both dreams deferred and dreams come true. He hails from tiny Macon, Ill., where he was a sophomore on the Macon Ironmen team that made a miracle run to the 1971 Illinois state championship game -- a story later immortalized by author Chris Ballard in his book "One Shot at Forever." 

Snitker's shot at this forever took 45 years, but he got there. And if it wasn't quite as much a miracle as Macon in '71, it was surely close enough.

"I'm numb," he said late Tuesday night, as the Brav-os celebrated their first World Series title in 26 years, after a record 16 postseason failures since. "I'm numb."

No doubt a side effect of all those bus rides, rattling along between Where's This and Halfway To That. But you know what?

I'm guessing the numbness felt pretty good, all in all.