If you watched the entirety of the Braves’ 3-2, walkoff loss to the Phillies on Sunday night, I’m sorry. If you didn’t, but you did watch their 5-4 loss to open this series back on Thursday, well, you didn’t miss much. At this point, the Braves are making the same mistake over and over, and their injury-riddled roster isn’t able to overcome it. So it goes, except where it’s going is a pretty lame place.
To recap: on Thursday, the Braves let Charlie Morton persist far too long despite not pitching particularly well, leading to a big blow. Then, Grant Holmes doubled up on fastballs to Nick Castellanos, and paid the price, as a two-run homer turned a one-run lead into a one-run deficit that become a one-run loss.
So, on Sunday, the Braves let Spencer Schwellenbach persist far too long despite not pitching particularly well, leading to a big blow that, in Schwellenbach’s defense, was not really his fault, just poor fortune to have two softly-hit bloops find paydirt, followed by an okay hit ball that split the defense instead of going towards an outfielder. Then, after the Atlanta bullpen shone as brightly as they have all season, forcing a tie game all the way into the 11th, the Braves botched a double play chance, and asked Holmes to face Castellanos with two outs and the winning run on third. In a 1-2 count, Holmes threw a fastball down the middle, and Castellanos hit it back up the box to end the game.
It feels weird to lose the first and last game of the series in this very specific way, but mostly everything about this season has been the bad kind of weird. I’m not really even sure it’s worth recapping the game in full, because fundamentally, blah.
The Braves got on the board first, thanks to a two-out solo homer by Michael Harris II off Aaron Nola in the third. A walk, a single, and Whit Merrifield beating out a double play ball scored a second run in the fourth.
Spencer Schwellenbach didn’t pitch particularly well, which is more or less where the trouble began. He had an 0/1 K/BB ratio through two innings, and his only two strikeouts of the game came within a span of three batters in one of his two perfect frames. He had a fairly low pitch count, which is something akin to the kiss of death for a Braves starter once the middle innings roll around, and in this case, said kiss was sloppy and gross as well as being toxic. Basically, Trea Turner hit a soft bloop to right, and then Bryce Harper hit the uber-bloop at around 65 mph down the left field line, putting the tying run on second. Schwellenbach got ahead of Castellanos 0-2, despite hanging a slider on the second pitch, and then hung another slider, which was hit into left-center to tie the game.
Again, there’s no knock on Schwellenbach here in particular — you live by the BABIP, you die by the BABIP. The only real issue was, again, the lack of urgency. Schwellenbach wasn’t pitching that well, relying on balls finding gloves, pretty much all game. Castellanos came up with the leverage index above 3.00, i.e., more than triple the importance of the average situation. The Braves are hanging on to a playoff spot by a thread, every other relevant team in the Wild Card race had already won, and, oh, again — they got burned by the exact same lack of urgency earlier in this series. But, you know, once more into the breach.
Much of the rest of the game, until Holmes was asked to face Castellanos again, was basically what happens when neither the Island of Misfit Toys nor the few legitimate bats in the lineup can do anything.
The Braves got a leadoff walk in the seventh, but it was erased on a double play. There was a leadoff single in the eighth, but Jeff Hoffman blew Jorge Soler away with an elevated fastball, which apparently caused Marcell Ozuna to sit on the fastball for four straight pitches, of which only one was a fastball (and it was too high and inside to offer at), and on which Ozuna struck out in pretty pathetic fashion. Matt Strahm suffered some serious issues in the ninth... or maybe he was just keenly aware that walking the bases loaded to face Orlando Arcia and Luke Williams (who pinch-ran to enter the game, to no avail, in the eighth) is apparently a legitimate strategy.
The Braves didn’t score in extras, either, though there was a bunch of weird stuff there, including pinch-hitting Adam Duvall, who hadn’t had a PA in over a week, to face a righty, to replace Eli White, who himself came in as a defensive replacement. In the 11th, both Travis d’Arnaud and Merrifield failed to score Ozuna from third with one out, just like Arcia and Williams a few innings earlier.
While all of this was playing out, the bullpen was oh so good. This bullpen, especially when the dregs aren’t asked to get outs, and a modicum of handedness is paid attention to, is straight nails. The team doesn’t seem to care, though, but again, so it goes. A combination of Dylan Lee, Pierce Johnson, Joe Jimenez, Raisel Iglesias (for two innings), and Aaron Bummer combined to post a 7/2 K/BB ratio in five innings, and one of those walks was a really bizarre sequence where Bummer, after retiring Kyle Schwarber, was not asked to intentionally walk Turner despite Turner’s run being completely irrelevant — he walked him anyway, but what a completely useless gamble the Braves took there.
Anyway, that brought the game to the sequence where Bryce Harper faced Bummer and hit what should’ve been a double play ball right at Williams. The problem was that Williams threw to Merrifield, who wasn’t at the second base bag yet, and Merrifield had to awkwardly run to the base and throw across his body, which let Harper reach safely. A few pitches later, Holmes made the same mistake he made on Thursday, and here we are.
The Braves will now return home to face the Rockies, but at this point, especially at this point, it’s clear that it’s no longer about whom they face. It’s more just — will this be a game where the deliberate decision to let your starter go a third time through blows up in their face? If no, then they’ll win. If yes, well, you hope at least some of the bats will come through, or else it’ll be another game like this one.
The Braves have 25 games to run out the clock on the final playoff spot, or I guess make a run and take one of the higher ones, though that seems unlikely at the moment. They could make things easier for themselves, but let’s be real: if they didn’t do it in this series, or in this game, after they already lost a game in this series to the exact same stuff — when are they going to?
