I think it's the randomness of baseball in a 3 round playoff format with 5 & 7 game series that resulted in the Braves lack of success.. Your odds of making it to the playoffs with a good team in baseball are also very good. The braves had ton of sustained success in the 90's and made it to the playoffs almost every year. But, once you make it to the playoffs, even as the better regular season team, your odds of winning a 5 or 7 game series are only slightly better than a coin toss. Assuming pure coin toss odds, once you make the playoffs, your odds of winning it all in a given year are just 12.5%. So even across multiple years of being in the hunt, you can see how the Braves only won one when you start looking at it that way.