There\u2019s a baseball saying you may have heard: \u201cyou can\u2019t walk off the island.\u201d While it generally pertains to MLB\u2019s international free agency system in reference to the Caribbean, the Braves lived their own version of it tonight in a 5-3 loss to the Cardinals: maybe some teams can walk their way to a win, but it\u2019s probably not these Braves.<\/p>\n
The game itself, well, you\u2019ve seen it before. Maybe not all together, but enough similar snippets throughout this dreadful month, and in past years, that you get the idea. The Braves give up homers, don\u2019t hit homers, and do enough to make it interesting but not actually enough to win. The kicker in all this is that the Braves sent seven to the plate in the eighth inning, at one point loading the bases and putting the tying run on second. The only run they actually scored in that inning? It came on a wild pitch. That\u2019s how the month has gone, that\u2019s how this game went, and the Braves will probably want to figure out something on the offensive end before too long, or it won\u2019t matter whether they walk or run or don\u2019t run or whether any islands are involved.<\/p>\n
Matthew Liberatore has not had a good season, and has had an awful June. He had a good start in this one, but I wonder how much of that was just the Braves being ill-suited for what he brought (or didn\u2019t bring) to the table. Liberatore had four walks and a hit-by-pitch in five innings, but he struck out nine. The Braves got the leadoff man on in every inning from the second through the sixth, but only scored one — and that came thanks to a steal, a wild pitch, and a sacrifice fly.<\/p>\n
It seemed for a bit that Liberatore\u2019s issues might do him in: he walked two to start the second. But then, he struck out the side. The killer was Austin Riley striking out on a hanging slider with one out, but Joey Bart also took two strikes to end the frame. In the third, Matt Olson took two hittable fastballs to fall behind 0-2 before a strike three whiff on a hanging curve. I won\u2019t go over every PA, but you get the idea. Liberatore wasn\u2019t exactly filling up the zone, but the Braves seemed utterly baffled on when to swing or not swing — kinda-sorta seeming like they wanted to draw walks if he wasn\u2019t going to throw strikes, but not actually really battling or anything to get the walks or anything else, either.<\/p>\n
On the flip side, Martin Perez had a bad pachinko day, and eh. I can\u2019t really beat anyone up about it, because this is what you get when you start Perez, so you either have to do something to overcome the bad pachinko or you can just accept it\u2019ll be a loss when it happens. Perez managed just one strikeout through three scoreless, gave up a game-tying homer on a down-the-middle 3-2 cutter to Nelson Velazquez, and then a three-run homer to Nathan Church later in the inning. He finished with a 1\/3 K\/BB ratio in five innings, which was pretty much ballgame, because the Braves have hit multiple homers just four times in June, and they sure as hell weren\u2019t going to clear a deficit without them given their lineup. James Karichak had a leadoff walk turn into a run the nearly same way the Braves scored their first — walk, steal, wild pitch, sac fly. Dylan Dodd, Ian Hamilton, and Raisel Iglesias (getting some work in) held down the fort the rest of the way, but to no avail.<\/p>\n
The Braves plated a second run in the seventh with a two-out rally: a walk (what else?), Drake Baldwin\u2019s o-fer-snapping bloop single (his first hit in about two weeks), and a midrange liner by Ozzie Albies. Matt Olson had a chance to do something cool, but he fouled off the two strikes he got, and hit a 2-2 pitch running in on him weakly for a groundout.<\/p>\n
Then came the eighth. Mauricio Dubon had a solid single. Mike Yastrzemski had an infield single to the left of the third baseman. Austin Riley then had the most emblematic PA: he took a pitch down the middle that probably should\u2019ve been a three-run game-tying homer, later swung at a pitch that bounced, and struck out on another fastball down the middle that probably also should\u2019ve been a game-tying three-run homer. If you\u2019re not going to swing at a first-pitch fastball because you might not be able to hit it (as evinced by the strikeout pitch), I\u2019m not sure you should be playing. And if you\u2019re sitting there taking a first-pitch fastball, as the Braves have done repeatedly in June, the offensive approach might need to be seriously reshuffled in the coming days. The Braves then deployed Rowdy Tellez and Dominic Smith as consecutive pinch-hitters: both walked, with a wild pitch to Tellez scoring the third Braves run. Baldwin battled, but ultimately, he couldn\u2019t actually hook a fastball on the low-and-inside corner anywhere useful, and hit it weakly to second.<\/p>\n
Olson finally unloaded on a hittable sinker in the ninth for a one-out double, but the other three batters in the frame hit exceedingly weak groundouts. The first two were on very crushable pitches, so yeah, there\u2019s a lot of work to do teamwide here to get back to the \u201cswing early and hit it real hard\u201d stuff they were doing in April and May. Until that happens, this result will be fairly common, whether they manage to walk a bunch or not.<\/p>\n
The division lead is down to 2.5 games. The series continues tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a baseball saying you may have heard: \u201cyou can\u2019t walk off the island.\u201d While it generally pertains…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[306490,363,99],"class_list":["post-736358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-atlanta-braves-scores","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}