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Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning during the regular season you’ll get a fresh, topical story to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
At the dawn of June, the defending World Series champions didn’t resemble a likely candidate to reel off the league’s longest winning streak of the season. After blowing a 6–0 lead against Arizona in an 8–7 loss on May 31, the Braves were 23–27 with a -16 run differential, 10.5 games behind the Mets in the NL East and five games out of a playoff spot. It was perhaps the low point of what’d quickly become a disappointing campaign, handing their rivals in New York the third-largest division lead at the end of May in the divisional era (since 1969).
