Atlanta Braves can’t buy any breaks, fall 6-2
There are some days in which nothing much goes right for you. This was one of those days.
In total, the Atlanta Braves have split their weather-reduced 2-game series with the Nationals. But this Sunday afternoon game was genuinely annoying on so many levels.
It’s as if the Strat-O-Matic dice were loaded in the favor of the Nationals throughout.
Let me enumerate the things that should have benefited the Braves:
- Max Scherzer starts, but ‘only’ goes 6 innings – throwing 107 pitches in the process
- Scherzer gives up 8 hits and walks another batter in the process
- Braves manage 14 hits in the game – with their bullpen giving up 6 in just 3 innings
- Atlanta gets 3 hits apiece from the first 2 batters in the order, plus 3 from Inciarte
- Atlanta steals 2 bases… well – it was really three, but we’ll get to that.
All of that sounds pretty good… until you then look at the flip side:
- Acuña being thrown out at second trying to stretch a single… and may not have quite run hard enough out of the box.
- Charlie Culberson thrown out at second base on a steal attempt despite a replay review and video evidence to the contrary.
- The Nationals scored 6 times: once on an infield bouncer that Freddie Freeman was unable to handle cleanly for a short throw home.
- 2 of their runs came with 2 outs.
- They managed 15 hits.
- The Braves stranded 10 runners.
- The Braves hit at least 5 balls to the warning track or off the wall… 3 were caught, a couple of those not entirely easily done. In any case, homers were missed by mere millimeters.
- I lost count of how many 2-strike hits that the Nats managed… it was at least 8.
- Back-firing pitching matchups were the order of the day.
Then there were some curious substitution decisions:
- The use of Sam Freeman – hopefully to get just 1 out, but then didn’t.
- The use of Luke Jackson – RHP – to face Juan Soto, Matt Adams, and Daniel Murphy (all lefties) to begin the 7th. They went double, single, single and plated another run.
At least he then erased the switch-hitting Matt Wieters (who is bad from both sides of the plate) and the 2 Right-hand hitters that followed. Insert eye-roll here.
Opportunities Lost
The patience of hitters early on – notably Freeman and Markakis – looked like a good plan, but the Braves failed to capitalize against Scherzer, who struck out a more-or-less customary 7 batters.
Braves’ starter Mike Foltynewicz almost (and probably should have) finished 6 innings and was credited with 4 earned runs (Freeman throwing the pitch to Bryce Harper that brough in #4). He was a bit rusty, but was solid after a difficult 1st inning.
I would post the MLB Replays video of the Culberson steal attempt, but it hasn’t been tweeted out yet, Perhaps they are waiting for the incendiary tweets from Braves’ fans to cool a bit.
But I can post some of those:
In case you missed it, this was the scene… and thanks Dave Owens, for tweeting this:
So in short, this was simply one of those games that the Braves somehow, someway seemed destined to lose. It wasn’t the multiple rain delays, it wasn’t really their bats, it wasn’t really even Max Scherzer… but it was everything conspiring to fall just short by inches, millimeters, and microseconds of converging to something that would fall into place.
But such things are simply that much more aggravating when it appears that the game’s very Powers That Be are also against you.
They say you can’t fight City Hall. Maybe, but you can certainly make it as uncomfortable as you can for them.
Makeup Date Announced
Monday evening, in Miami: Sean Newcomb and Jose Urena. *sigh*