<img alt="Atlanta Braves v Colorado Rockies" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TaaDcXNCPymmPUC8gbJ-vMY_FeQ=/0x0:6861x4574/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73515361/2165899349.0.jpg">
Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
Braves hit four homers and lose to a .500+ BABIP-against The Braves snapped their second six-game losing streak since the All-Star Break yesterday. They had a six-run lead heading into the eighth today, and thanks to the four homers they crushed, it looked like things might be on the upswing, especially with them recapturing a playoff spot yesterday. But then they fell victim to a seven-run eighth inning, and, well, as put succinctly in our masthead Slack channel, “the plane has crashed into the mountain.”
Look, baseball is a great game precisely because there’s just enough stuff you can’t control to make it non-deterministic and make pretty much every game worth watching. It’s a formula that’s made baseball an incredibly compelling spectator sport for over a century, even if it’s somewhat incomprehensible to the uninitiated and therefore has a bit of an uphill climb in places that didn’t grow up with what probably seems arcana. It’s also a formula that can suck the will to live out of you when your team is hanging on for dear life due to macro-level stuff they can’t control (like injuries) and a wholesale bungling of the stuff they can control over the course of the season, because that random variation doesn’t care about the ur-narrative of a team’s season. It just cares that however improbable, some thing you probably haven’t seen before can show up at any time and either elate you, or ruin your day.
You already know how this game went, so you know that in case, the Braves had their day ruined by eight Rockies hits in the eighth, including six straight to take the lead. Does recapping the rest of the game even matter? Or is it sufficient to say that at this point, even when the Braves did most things right, didn’t have any weird defensive gaffes, and even got rewarded for leaving a temporarily-struggling starter in the game, they still lost in a novel and terrible way, they’re just toast? I’ll leave that up to you, and provide a brief recap of events. At this point, though, I don’t really know. There’s doing dumb stuff and being punished, but there’s also not doing dumb stuff and losing to a .536 BABIP-against. You could drive a train through the gap between those two things, and that train, well, it’s derailed at this point, much like the Braves’ playoff odds.
The Braves got on the board first against Kyle Freeland, as Austin Riley caught an elevated slider and mashed it over the center-field fence for a quick 1-0 lead. Freeland settled in a bit after that, but a two-out walk to Matt Olson in the fourth was followed by Travis d’Arnaud crushing an 0-1 changeup into left-center to make it a 3-0 game. After another single, Freeland left the game with what appeared to be a blister issue.
Meanwhile, Spencer Schwellenbach rolled through three innings, A hard-hit single and a flare in the third put two on, but he got a strikeout to escape the jam. In the fourth, after two BABIP-y hits, he temporarily faltered, issuing a five-pitch walk to load the bases. After that, the Rockies notched a run-scoring forceout and then a weird catatonic duck flare into right that brought the game within a run, but then a shallow fly and a strikeout ended that rally with the Braves still up.
Schwellenbach recovered to throw two more frames with just a walk yielded; I probably would’ve pulled him after he walked the bases loaded, but hey, he did a nice job making the in-game adjustment to continue to be effective further into the game.
The Braves, meanwhile, did nothing against Peter Lambert, who replaced Freeland, but then jumped over Justin Lawrence in the seventh. After a leadoff walk and a single, Jorge Soler crushed the first of what would be two homers for him; doubles from Riley and Olson later pushed across a seventh run. A.J. Minter survived two flares that started the seventh to keep it a five-run game, and Soler homered again in the eighth to make it a six-run game.
And then everything went terribly. There’s going to be a large temptation to blame Luke Jackson here, and yeah, Jackson sucked. It’s also kind of annoying to have Jackson up at the MLB level and Dylan Lee in Gwinnett because of options, but that’s more on the macro-level pitching bungling, and pitching Jackson in a six-run game is reasonable. No one could’ve escaped the BABIP hell that started with him pitching, though.
After a strikeout, there was a 50-50 liner single, and then a homer from Jake Cave that made it 8-4. Then there was another strikeout, and a well-struck single, followed by...
A 50-50 double
Joe Jimenez replacing Jackson
A soft liner over the infield on a pitch not in the zone to make it a two-run game
A hard single
An 81 mph single that ends the inning if it’s hit even remotely closer to Orlando Arcia, but it wasn’t, and instead made it a one-run game, also on a pitch nowhere near the zone
And, finally, a double with a hit probability under 40 percent that gave the Rockies the lead
You could say that Jimenez should’ve made an adjustment not to throw in the zone early to avoid the hacks the Rockies were taking, but he actually did do that, and the swings still resulted in hits.
Anyway, the Braves only sent three batters to the plate in the top of the ninth, because Matt Olson hit into a twin killing after Marcell Ozuna’s single. That was the third double play of the game the Braves hit into.
At this point, I’m not really sure what you can say about this team. Maybe all the bad juju culminated in the drenching they got today, but probably not. They weren’t hitting well, and therefore losing a lot. They’ve started hitting great, and are still losing. They weren’t hitting homers and losing, now they’re massively outhomering the opposition and losing. They were making dumb pitching decisions basically daily, and those didn’t really happen today, and they still lost. Some people were saying that the Braves weren’t walking enough, and they doubled the Rockies’ walks today, and still lost.
There’s not really much of an escape, but the schedule is relentless, and now they have to go deal with the Giants, who are surging up the standings.
The premise of doing things right in baseball is to not take anything for granted, to know that the worm can always turn against you, and build a cushion in case that happens. The Braves clearly didn’t do that, and now they have a whole battalion of worms raining artillery fire down on their heads. The only way out is through, but it’s not really clear they’re going to get through this — they lost this series while out-wOBAing the opposition massively in both losses (230 wRC+ for the Braves, 167 wRC+ for the Rockies in this game), but playing worse than the opposition hasn’t worked either.
Anyway, tune in tomorrow to see what fresh hell has been unleashed upon this team in San Francisco, I guess.
<img alt="Atlanta Braves v Colorado Rockies" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TaaDcXNCPymmPUC8gbJ-vMY_FeQ=/0x0:6861x4574/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73515361/2165899349.0.jpg">
Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
Braves hit four homers and lose to a .500+ BABIP-against The Braves snapped their second six-game losing streak since the All-Star Break yesterday. They had a six-run lead heading into the eighth today, and thanks to the four homers they crushed, it looked like things might be on the upswing, especially with them recapturing a playoff spot yesterday. But then they fell victim to a seven-run eighth inning, and, well, as put succinctly in our masthead Slack channel, “the plane has crashed into the mountain.”
Look, baseball is a great game precisely because there’s just enough stuff you can’t control to make it non-deterministic and make pretty much every game worth watching. It’s a formula that’s made baseball an incredibly compelling spectator sport for over a century, even if it’s somewhat incomprehensible to the uninitiated and therefore has a bit of an uphill climb in places that didn’t grow up with what probably seems arcana. It’s also a formula that can suck the will to live out of you when your team is hanging on for dear life due to macro-level stuff they can’t control (like injuries) and a wholesale bungling of the stuff they can control over the course of the season, because that random variation doesn’t care about the ur-narrative of a team’s season. It just cares that however improbable, some thing you probably haven’t seen before can show up at any time and either elate you, or ruin your day.
You already know how this game went, so you know that in case, the Braves had their day ruined by eight Rockies hits in the eighth, including six straight to take the lead. Does recapping the rest of the game even matter? Or is it sufficient to say that at this point, even when the Braves did most things right, didn’t have any weird defensive gaffes, and even got rewarded for leaving a temporarily-struggling starter in the game, they still lost in a novel and terrible way, they’re just toast? I’ll leave that up to you, and provide a brief recap of events. At this point, though, I don’t really know. There’s doing dumb stuff and being punished, but there’s also not doing dumb stuff and losing to a .536 BABIP-against. You could drive a train through the gap between those two things, and that train, well, it’s derailed at this point, much like the Braves’ playoff odds.
The Braves got on the board first against Kyle Freeland, as Austin Riley caught an elevated slider and mashed it over the center-field fence for a quick 1-0 lead. Freeland settled in a bit after that, but a two-out walk to Matt Olson in the fourth was followed by Travis d’Arnaud crushing an 0-1 changeup into left-center to make it a 3-0 game. After another single, Freeland left the game with what appeared to be a blister issue.
Meanwhile, Spencer Schwellenbach rolled through three innings, A hard-hit single and a flare in the third put two on, but he got a strikeout to escape the jam. In the fourth, after two BABIP-y hits, he temporarily faltered, issuing a five-pitch walk to load the bases. After that, the Rockies notched a run-scoring forceout and then a weird catatonic duck flare into right that brought the game within a run, but then a shallow fly and a strikeout ended that rally with the Braves still up.
Schwellenbach recovered to throw two more frames with just a walk yielded; I probably would’ve pulled him after he walked the bases loaded, but hey, he did a nice job making the in-game adjustment to continue to be effective further into the game.
The Braves, meanwhile, did nothing against Peter Lambert, who replaced Freeland, but then jumped over Justin Lawrence in the seventh. After a leadoff walk and a single, Jorge Soler crushed the first of what would be two homers for him; doubles from Riley and Olson later pushed across a seventh run. A.J. Minter survived two flares that started the seventh to keep it a five-run game, and Soler homered again in the eighth to make it a six-run game.
And then everything went terribly. There’s going to be a large temptation to blame Luke Jackson here, and yeah, Jackson sucked. It’s also kind of annoying to have Jackson up at the MLB level and Dylan Lee in Gwinnett because of options, but that’s more on the macro-level pitching bungling, and pitching Jackson in a six-run game is reasonable. No one could’ve escaped the BABIP hell that started with him pitching, though.
After a strikeout, there was a 50-50 liner single, and then a homer from Jake Cave that made it 8-4. Then there was another strikeout, and a well-struck single, followed by...
A 50-50 double
Joe Jimenez replacing Jackson
A soft liner over the infield on a pitch not in the zone to make it a two-run game
A hard single
An 81 mph single that ends the inning if it’s hit even remotely closer to Orlando Arcia, but it wasn’t, and instead made it a one-run game, also on a pitch nowhere near the zone
And, finally, a double with a hit probability under 40 percent that gave the Rockies the lead
You could say that Jimenez should’ve made an adjustment not to throw in the zone early to avoid the hacks the Rockies were taking, but he actually did do that, and the swings still resulted in hits.
Anyway, the Braves only sent three batters to the plate in the top of the ninth, because Matt Olson hit into a twin killing after Marcell Ozuna’s single. That was the third double play of the game the Braves hit into.
At this point, I’m not really sure what you can say about this team. Maybe all the bad juju culminated in the drenching they got today, but probably not. They weren’t hitting well, and therefore losing a lot. They’ve started hitting great, and are still losing. They weren’t hitting homers and losing, now they’re massively outhomering the opposition and losing. They were making dumb pitching decisions basically daily, and those didn’t really happen today, and they still lost. Some people were saying that the Braves weren’t walking enough, and they doubled the Rockies’ walks today, and still lost.
There’s not really much of an escape, but the schedule is relentless, and now they have to go deal with the Giants, who are surging up the standings.
The premise of doing things right in baseball is to not take anything for granted, to know that the worm can always turn against you, and build a cushion in case that happens. The Braves clearly didn’t do that, and now they have a whole battalion of worms raining artillery fire down on their heads. The only way out is through, but it’s not really clear they’re going to get through this — they lost this series while out-wOBAing the opposition massively in both losses (230 wRC+ for the Braves, 167 wRC+ for the Rockies in this game), but playing worse than the opposition hasn’t worked either.
Anyway, tune in tomorrow to see what fresh hell has been unleashed upon this team in San Francisco, I guess.
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