Today's Three Things: Hurston Waldrep Shelled in Blowout Loss to Pirates

The Atlanta Braves dropped their series opener 12-4 to the Pittsburgh Pirates in PNC Park on Tuesday night.

Here is Today’s Three Things from the contest.

The Turning Point

The bottom of the third inning.

The Braves were still losing the game, but had scored a run to bring the deficit to two runs. The onus was now on Hurston Waldrep to prove that the first inning was just a fluke and he could keep Pittsburgh’s offense at bay while Atlanta chipped away at the deficit.

He was not able to do that.

Walked allowed the first two batters to reach, via walk and a single. The walk was a mostly non-competitive one to Bryan Reynolds, with only one of the six pitches being in the strike zone. The single was actually decent process - a 2-1 pitch off the plate and moving away from righty Esmerlyn Valdez, but he got just enough on it to make the play difficult. Ozzie Albies got to the ball and knocked it down behind the bag, but couldn’t do anything with it, and Pittsburgh had two on.

For Ryan O’Hearn.

Who hit a grand slam in the first inning.

That slam came on a hanging curveball, but this three-run homer was on a slider in the lower third of the zone. It wasn’t a cheap one, either - 415 feet and out in 25 of the league’s thirty ballparks.

Just for fun, O’Hearn went on to hit a third homer off of reliever Connor Thomas, this one also a three-run shot. Per Elias Sports Bureau, O’Hearn is the first MLB player since the RBI became a stat in 1920 to have each of his team’s first ten RBI in a game.

Today’s Player of the Game

This is hard. The Postcast viewers get to vote in a YouTube poll while we’re live for wins, but for losses, either I choose on my own or leave it up to the Braves Today Discord (which is free to join and a great place for Braves conversation).

One could argue that Connor Thomas deserves this for giving Atlanta 3.2 innings out of the bullpen (and probably catching a flight to Gwinnett tomorrow morning for his troubles). His length saved a bullpen that entered the night overused and with questionable availability.

There were a few decent offensive performances out of the lineup in this one, including a double and a single from each of Michael Harris II, Mauricio Dubón, and Austin Riley. Mike Yastrzemski had a two-RBI single in the 9th inning, and off a real pitcher too (former Braves reliever Hunter Stratton, who was traded to acquire backup catcher Joey Bart a few weeks ago).

Let’s do this: Substack has a polling feature, so I’ll leave this up to the Braves Today readers. Let me know who deserves to be the Player of the Game for tonight.

This poll is set to be open until 11 PM ET on Wednesday.

What You’ll Be Talking About

Hurston Waldrep’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad game.

The righty finished with seven earned runs across his 3.1 innings, coming on six hits. And the batted ball profile, as wild as it sounds, was not one that would typically allow seven runs in an outing.

Of the fourteen balls in play off of Waldrep, only five were hard-hit and the overall exit velocity allowed was 88.8 mph - not great, but not terrible by any means. And the launch angle distribution was wild - only three of those 14 balls were hit in the air, but one was a line drive single and the other two were O’Hearn’s home runs.

But the real issue wasn’t the batted balls for Waldrep; it was the free passes. He walked five and hit another batter today, and most of those runners were cashed in by the Pirates/O’Hearn. The grand slam in the first was made possible by a HBP, a walk, and a single, while the three-run bomb in the 3rd inning was a walk and a single. Waldrep’s last two batters in the 4th reached via one-out walks, but Thomas did a good job of getting two consecutive ground balls to strand them on 2nd and 3rd.

Waldrep just could not reliably find the zone tonight, hampering his ability to effectively utilize the splitter. He finished with only 44% of his pitches in the strike zone, including just 44% for the sinker and 35-36% on his primary whiff pitches. Pittsburgh was able to mostly ignore the splitter (9% chase rate), owing to being ahead in the count, and swung at just five of his 17 thrown (with one whiff and two batted balls).

I still believe Waldrep was rushed back from rehab for service time/extra minor league option reasons, but he was called back up to the majors too quickly and clearly needs more work to do to get himself back into midseason form. He’s currently lined up to start on Sunday in the final game before the All-Star Break, and barring either a bullpen game or the Braves holding out JR Ritchie until then, there’s not a lot of other options for Atlanta to make that start at the moment.

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 contest.

What’s Next for the Braves?

The Braves have a chance to even the series tomorrow evening, with Grant Holmes (5-4, 3.83 ERA) taking on Jared Jones (1-1, 5.28 ERA) at 6:40 PM ET.