Today's Three Things: Braves Hold Off Detroit for Series Sweep on Sunday

The Atlanta Braves have an eight-game winning streak, their longest of the season

The Atlanta Braves held off a late Detroit Tigers rally to take the finale 6-2 and secure a series sweep in Comerica Park on Sunday afternoon.

Here’s Today’s Three Things from the contest.

The Turning Point

Bottom of the 6th.

Finally getting into the Braves bullpen and looking to narrow an 0-2 Atlanta lead, Detroit had the bottom part of their order coming to the plate.

Against curveballer Pierce Johnson, catcher Dillon Dingler picked up one of his three hits, doubling on a sharp line drive to left. After Zack McKinstry walked and a pinch-hitter came up in place of Javier Báez, Atlanta reversed yesterday’s pitching change and went from Johnson to lefty Dylan Lee.

Lee was able to get a strikeout of Andy Ibáñez and a foul pop out of Jahmai Jones to preserve Atlanta’s lead and keep Detroit off the board. The Tigers wouldn’t threaten again until the 9th inning, where they’d finally get a run off of the Braves’ pen.

Today’s Player of the Game

Spencer Strider.

‘Quadzilla’ continued his return to form today, going five shutout innings against the Tigers with six strikeouts. While he allowed six hits, just one was for extra bases. He did need to work around traffic a lot today, having walked three batters, but got some strikeouts when needed, as well as a key groundout.

As we’ve discussed recently, Strider’s induced vertical break being closer to historic norms has allowed him to be more aggressive with the fastball in the zone. While his control wasn’t where he wanted it to be today, zoning the four-seamer just 54%, he was able to use the curveball to both steal strikes (three called strikes) and get whiffs (five whiffs in nine swings).

At this point, I’m confident in predicting that even if his upper-90s velocity doesn’t return next season (and I’m confident it will), he still ends up being a quality #2 pitcher for the Braves rotation just based on his fastball being good enough to set up an elite slider and a pretty-good curveball.

What You’ll Be Talking About

Atlanta’s all-around contributions on offense.

Four different Braves had multiple hits and six different players got on base multiple times, showing the balance we’ve been asking Atlanta to have for a long time now. The Braves got only one home run, coming off the bat of Ha-Seong Kim, but were able to put up six runs on eleven hits thanks to three different players having two-out RBI and picking three hits with runners in scoring position.

Looking for more discussion about this game?

Here’s tonight’s Postcast, with me and Locked On Braves host Jake Mastroianni, as we went live to break down the win.

What’s Next for the Braves?

Atlanta’s announced their starters for this week’s matchup against the Washington Nationals.

Monday: Chris Sale (5-5, 2.35) versus MacKenzie Gore (5-14, 4.00)
Tuesday: Hurston Waldrep (5-1, 3.04) versus Brad Lord (5-8, 4.18)
Wednesday: Bryce Elder (8-10, 5.36) versus Andrew Alvarez (1-1, 2.84)