2002 Atlanta Braves season
Major League Baseball season
The 2002 Atlanta Braves season marked the franchise's 37th season in Atlanta and 132nd overall. The Braves won their eighth consecutive division title, finishing 19 games ahead of the second-place Montreal Expos. The Braves lost the 2002 Divisional Series to the eventual NL Champion San Francisco Giants, 3–2. This would be the first of four consecutive NLDS losses in as many years, and the first of three consecutive years to do so by losing the deciding Game 5 at Turner Field.
2002 marked the final year that pitchers Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz played on the same team ending the reign of what has been considered by many the greatest pitching trio of all-time. All three would be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame a decade later. Smoltz set the Braves' single season record for saves (55). Chipper Jones moved to the outfield in left field to allow for Vinny Castilla to be signed and added to the lineup at third base. Julio Franco became a regular player in the second stint of his Major League career and Gary Sheffield was acquired to the Braves in 2002, playing at right field.
Offseason
October 26, 2001: Aaron Small was signed as a free agent with the Atlanta Braves.
“2002 Atlanta Braves season” enters the record as major League Baseball season. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Atlanta, Braves and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4599735. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “2002 Atlanta Braves season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.