The M-Braves salute the 1992 100-win Greenville Braves on Friday night

Any Minor League franchise that sticks around for a while is bound to run into a good season or two, maybe even a championship. For the Greenville Braves, though, the 1992 campaign was magical.

Since winning first the first Southern League title for the Braves in 1992, the Greenville Braves went on to snag another title in 1997, and two since moving to Pearl, Mississippi in 2008, and 2021. But 1992 saw the franchise snag minor league baseball’s ultimate brass ring: A 100-win regular season campaign. How special was it? No team has done it since and it had not been done previously by a class “AA” or “AAA” team since 1960. If one had to lay odds, it probably won’t be replicated any time soon. If ever.

In fact, in a recent survey of the 100 top minor league clubs of the previous century, Baseball America rated the 1992 Greenville Braves the 23rd best minor league team of all time. That’s made all the more impressive by the fact that of the 22 teams listed ahead of the 1992 Greenville Braves, only one team, “AAA’ Albuquerque in 1981, played after 1943.

Grady Little had been managing for 13 years and realized very early on after the club jumped out to a 17-3 start that something historic was in the making.

Mike Mordecai played a solid shortstop over the first half of the season, but when the G-Braves lost him to a promotion to Triple-A Richmond in the middle of the season, they got a more than satisfactory reinforcement in the 1990 No. 1 overall draft pick. At age 20, Chipper Jones faced Double-A pitching for the first time and batted .346 with nine homers, 11 triples and 17 doubles in 67 games. Coupled with catcher Javier Lopez, he had Braves fans daydreaming about years to come. The duo did some daydreaming of its own.

Not all of the prospects on that '92 G-Braves team developed into the Major League All-Star that Lopez became or the Hall of Famer Jones became. Melvin Nieves and Mike Kelly fell short of those marks, but each was electric in the Southern League. Nieves roped 18 homers and 23 doubles while posting a .381 OBP, and Kelly went yard 25 times and stole 22 bases. Tony Tarasco had 140 hits, two shy of Lopez's team-high.

The pitching staff was made up mostly of names forgotten by the baseball world three decades later, but the young hurlers turned in results appropriate for the organization that featured a National League-best staff led by Tom Glavine and John Smoltz. Some of the team's best hitters were players who wound up with brief or marginal big league careers. On the other hand, Greenville had a couple of prospects – Lopez included -- who helped Atlanta maintain dominance throughout the mid- and late-'90s. Whatever their respective destinies, these players formed a team that went 100-43 to win its division by 30 games before cruising to an SL title.

On the way to setting league records for wins, shutouts (24), and best road record (50-23), the '92 Greenville Braves led the loop in ERA (2.64 – the only team under 3.00), WHIP (1.151) and strikeouts (1,010), as well as batting average (.266), on-base percentage (.340), slugging percentage (.422), runs (709), hits (1,258), home runs (130 – the only team with more than 104) and so on and so forth.

Lopez, who played 115 games for the Braves' Double-A affiliate was named the Southern League’s Most Valuable Player and did stay in Greenville for the post-season before finding himself in an Atlanta uniform a month later in the World Series. Lopez went on to become a three-time Major League All-Star, World Series champion and 1996 NLCS MVP – was a 21-year-old catcher who led the G-Braves not just from behind the plate but at it. He batted .321/.362/.507 with 16 homers and 28 doubles.

To give an idea as to how unique Lopez’ feelings were towards a minor league club, the next season I asked the 1993 league MVP, Derek Lee of Memphis the exact same question and he said without reservation that he would be on the next plane for Kansas City. Memphis would have to make due in the playoffs without him.

One might figure that for the 1992 Greenville Braves that the season’s biggest moment would have been winning the fifth and deciding game of the Southern League finals at Chattanooga in front of 6,000 raucous fans at old Engle Stadium. But that wasn’t the case. For the players, the defining moment came in front of less than 600 on a damp and chilly evening at Greenville Municipal Stadium.

After already having won the first-half Eastern Division title, and also having clinched the second-half crown about two weeks earlier, you wouldn’t think there would have been much to play for on September 4th. This is unless you knew the G-Braves entered the night with a record of 99-43.

Tied at 1-1 entering the bottom of the ninth, Chipper opened the frame with a pinch-hit single. With one out Tony Tarasco ripped a liner to the right-field corner. Chipper easily beat the relay and the guys piled on each other as if they had won the league title. In retrospect, they had done something much greater.