3 Takeaways from Atlanta Braves Friday night win in Philadelphia
It’s a bit glib to call this a Pyrrhic victory, but the loss of Nick Markakis is going to be significant as the Atlanta Braves may have to make some tough decisions.
This was an odd game and odd win for the Atlanta Braves on Friday evening. Undoubtedly more will need to be said about this due to the serious ramifications of Nick Markakis‘ injury, so we’ll keep this to the point.
Our 1st TAKEAWAY is clearly the win and the revival of the offense, though it was as much or more about hitter patience and working counts as much as anything else.
After seeing so many strikeouts (22) in the Kansas City mini-series, Atlanta K’d just 6 times and received the benefits of 6 walks. The hitting was largely not blasting the ball around the yard (save for a long McCann homer and Albies double), and the 7 hits were spread around the lineup reasonably well.
2. Not Showing Up?
TAKEAWAY 2 is what made this game so bizarre. The Phillies were credited with “only” 2 errors, but aside from a nice catch by Bryce Harper against the wall (which still looked quite awkward) and catcher J.T. Realmuto nailing Albies as he tried to move to 3rd on a play at the plate, the home team came off looking sloppy and disengaged.
Given the Phillies situation, this is the absolute last thing you would have expected, yet there was some careless-looking play in the field and – as noted – their pitching more-or-less was flat as well.
In fact, it seemed that even their manager – Gabe Kapler – may have thrown in the towel a bit early last night as he failed to replace an obviously struggling Cole Irwin while he gave up 4 runs in the 6th inning… and then sent him back out for the 7th after hitting for himself with 2 runners on base and 1 out in the bottom of the 6th.
Yes – the score was 9-1 at the time, but it was still early in the 6th inning.
Those kinds of things send messages, and the message here was “we’re not going to give max effort tonight”.
3. The Injuries
Largely, the Braves have managed to avoid the injury bug this season.
Ender Inciarte was out for several weeks with his back ailment, but until recently, that had been the worst malady to concern Atlanta… and even so, Austin Riley stepped in and performed admirably in his stead.
In recent days, though, things are mounting up quickly:
- Dansby Swanson‘s heel appears to be much more troublesome than originally believed. This is where the team’s depth will immediately come into play.
- Max Fried‘s newest blister has taken him out for a couple of starts. He will be to test that soon.
- No one is appearing optimistic about Markakis’ injury. The phrase “season ending” is even being whispered around. That may be premature to say, but if this is at all like Freeman’s wrist break from 2017, then that kind of timetable is at least plausible… which could bring him back around playoff time.
- Kevin Gausman was given a ‘reset’ a plantar fasciitis was blamed… he’s back now, but we’ll at least mention this for the sake of completeness.
So the Atlanta Braves will have to persevere through this. It’s what they do.
Duvall?
We’ll continue to monitor the outfielder situation: Adam Duvall‘s name is already being mentioned heavily, though it’s hard to figure on him as the everyday option for the rest of the regular season.
The reason for this comes from a couple of things:
- Yes: Duvall now owns the Gwinnett single-season HR record with 29. He’s also hitting .259.
- Yes: as Austin Riley has been struggling mightily, Duvall had not been brought in to swap places with Riley.
- There was a recent quote from Brian Snitker (alas, unable to find the source tweet at this time) in which he indicated (paraphrasing) that the quality of major league pitching was such that putting Riley at AAA would not help, since Riley needs to continue to see the kinds of pitches he’s failing to hit.
- In a back-handed/unstated way, that also suggests that Duvall’s hitting his homers because he’s at the AAA level, and that perhaps the organization doesn’t believe in his bat in the majors.
We may soon find out. Duvall is the logical stop-gap for Markakis for the short term, though with the trade deadline looming, Atlanta may end up having to consider someone like Nick Castellanos or someone else after all.
We’ll only have a couple of days to see how he does.