The Braves Split. Their Biggest Questions Didn't.
AJ Smith-Shawver's return was encouraging, Chris Sale was brilliant and Atlanta's offense once again struggled to generate enough runs.
The Atlanta Braves split their Wednesday doubleheader with the New York Mets, losing this afternoon’s game one 3-2 before winning the nightcap 1-0.
Atlanta finishes their road trip 3-3 and is 8-5 since the All-Star Break, playing nine 1-run games in that stretch (and winning six of those).
Let’s talk about Wednesday.
The Story Behind the Box Score
The Braves split the doubleheader, but Wednesday reinforced the same concern that’s followed them throughout this road trip: the offense simply isn’t doing enough. The Braves finished with 14 hits on the day, but just three for extra bases, and scored only four runs across the two contests.
Taking that deeper, Atlanta went 3-3 on this road trip despite scoring just 13 runs during the first nine innings of these six games.
Game One: AJ Is Back...But Not All the Way Back
AJ Smith-Shawver and Mets lefty Sean Manaea were locked in a pitching duel early, with neither team getting on the board until the end of the outings for each respective starter.
Smith-Shawver finished both with an encouraging line and discouraging peripherals. In his first official game action back off of UCL repair, he allowed just two runs on four hits and two walks in 4.1 innings. He struck out four and clearly could have gone longer - he finished the outing with just 69 pitches thrown. The health and velocity were extremely encouraging. The finished-product stuff was not there yet.
Smith-Shawver had a first-pitch strike on just nine of his twenty batters, meaning he was working from behind more often than not. And both that and the lack of control of his secondaries today meant that New York was not chasing. And I mean, at all. Smith-Shawver had a chase rate of just 18%, with no Mets swinging at a single non-fastball out of the zone. Being able to run the fastball up to 100 helped AJ today, but he finished with just two total whiffs on the entire arsenal today, in 29 swings. Being able to throw more early strikes and get ahead of batters with both the heater and the cutter will allow AJ to unleash the splitter and curveball for chase and whiffs.
On the offensive side, Atlanta responded to the two runs that knocked Smith-Shawver out of the game in the 5th with two runs that knocked Sean Manaea out of the game in the 6th. Dylan Dodd took the loss, though, after running out of gas in his second inning of work. He walked two, seeing them advance on a lineout that was the second out of the inning, and then gave up an RBI double that wasn’t actually a bad pitch - a sinker WELL above the zone that Carson Benge climbed up the ladder to get.
Pitching nerd alert! The statcast page will call all of these pitches “sinkers”, but Dodd has some of that Josh Hader-like four-seam movement because he’s both a natural pronator and harnessing some seam-shift orientation to actually increase the induced vertical break over his previous four-seam grip. So while the card says he’s throwing a sinker to the upper rail looking for whiffs, think of it like a four-seamer and that location suddenly makes a lot more sense.
If you over-pronate a four-seamer by getting really inside the ball, it becomes a bad sinker, essentially. But if you swap to a two-seam grip, it suddenly becomes a good four-seamer. Baseball’s weird sometimes.
Game Two: Chris Sale’s The Best in the World
This was an awesome pitching duel, if you’re an amateur pitching nerd, and immensely boring if you’re just here to see runs being scored.
Chris Sale’s first hit allowed came to open the 3rd inning, while Christian Scott opened the game with a leadoff single but nothing else until the 5th. Sale had everything working, finishing with six scoreless innings and just two hits opposite no walks and nine strikeouts. He had sixteen whiffs and a 37% CSW while allowing only two hard-hit balls (in eleven total batted balls) and his average exit velocity allowed of 86.4 mph was slower than his nine changeups he threw tonight.
The turning point of this game was the sixth inning, for both sides, and illustrates the difference in a veteran like Sale and a youngster still working his way back from Tommy John surgery in Scott. Jim Jarvis got things started with a leadoff double on a hanging curveball. Drake Baldwin golfed a sinker out of the dirt for a single, moving Jarvis to third, before Matt Olson ripped a one-out single back up the middle to get Jimmy Baseball in from third. The Braves would actually go on to load the bases thanks to an Ozzie Albies walk (in this economy?), but a terrible Michael Harris pop-up and a routine deep fly ball from Mauricio Dubón would end the frame with no other runs.
Chris Sale would turn around, though, and give up his own leadoff hit. Eric Wagaman, the last man on the bench who was getting a rare start today, got a slider in the zone and shot it out to center. But unlike Scott, who kept getting got by quality contact, Sale induced two weak flyouts and a pop out to end the inning and strand Wagaman on first.
Atlanta rode the leverage train to a win in this one, with Didier Fuentes (making his second appearance of the day), Dylan Lee, and Raisel Iglesias combining for three scoreless innings to avert a sweep.
What Wednesday Told Us
AJ Smith-Shawver showed why he’s a promising starter, and he’s absolutely part of the future of this ball club, but there’s still work to be done to get him back to form. We saw him settle in last year after a few starts, and I’m both expecting that this year and for him to end up getting meaningful October innings for Atlanta this season.
The need for a lefty-mashing bat is still there, with Atlanta being flummoxed by 4.52 ERA Sean Manaea in game one to the tune of two runs on five hits, both runs not coming in until their third time through the order. The righty trio of Ronald Acuña Jr., Ozzie Albies, and Austin Riley combined to go 0-for-11 against Manaea and the Mets.
Even if you think that Sean Murphy can genuinely help here, which is most certainly not a universal opinion, more offensive firepower ve southpaws is needed.
After a hot post-ASB stretch, Riley’s back to being a problem. He went 0-7 with six strikeouts today, and if the trade deadline’s offensive addition is a bat that can play the outfield, it might be time for production to start outweighing patience. Would that be when we start seeing Walt Weiss swapping Mauricio Dubón in at third base for stretches, or would that hold until October? They’ve given him two-thirds of the season to get right (seriously - today was exactly the two-thirds mark), and it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s more than fair to ask if it’s coming at all this season.
Didier Fuentes threw 10 pitches in this afternoon’s game one, averaging 96.1 mph on his fastball (-1.1 off his season average), and then came back tonight and was airing it out in game two. Fuentes topped out at 99.6 mph and was averaging 98.3, a full 1.1 mph over his season average and over two mph harder than his first appearance today.
Fuentes dialing back the velo in the first game tells me this was likely the plan going into the day and he was prepared for it, but also…why? They’ve resisted using him on back-to-back days for a lot of the season, so they’re going to throw him twice in the same one?
Let’s Talk About It
We don’t typically do a postcast after game one of a doubleheader, so tonight’s Locked On Braves Postcast became sort of a recap of the day that was in Atlanta baseball.
What’s Next?
Atlanta’s flying home for a four-game home series and then, mercifully, an off day on Monday. The Nationals are in town for four games, and here are the pitching matchups for the series:
Thu: Grant Holmes vs Jake Irvin
Fri: Bryce Elder vs LHP Foster Griffin
Sat: Reynaldo López vs Miles Mikolas
Sun: Martín Pérez vs Cade Cavalli