The Braves suffer their first sweep and three-game losing streak of the year as Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers disposed of them without much effort
Well, mark this down, retrospectively, as one of the not-uncommon Atlanta Braves West Coast Road Trips From Hell. After a sweep at the hands of the Dodgers, the Braves complete their first sojourn to the Pacific Coast with a 1-5 record, and probably, a fair bit of consternation.
Really, this game was all Shohei Ohtani, as he alone pretty much overpowered the Braves. Max Fried, pitching in his home metro area, issued a leadoff walk to Mookie Betts, and then gave up a no-doubter on a curveball in the up-and-in portion of the zone. This in and of itself is kind of insane: in the entire Statcast era, a lefty batter has hit a curveball there for a homer literally three times. In the entire pitch tracking era, which goes back to 2008, it’s happened just 15 times. But, well, Ohtani is Ohtani.
After that, Fried really did his Max Fried thing, collecting five strikeouts to just one walk, and an Ohtani single, through five innings. That gave the Braves a chance, but in either you-guessed-it or you-are-horribly-confuzzled-by-it fashion, the bats did nothing against James Paxton, who’s struggled mightily this year.
Through the first 18 batters, the only batters to reach against Paxton were Austin Riley in the first (after a weird sequence where he thought he walked on 3-2, and then eventually drew a real walk), Adam Duvall in the third (promptly erased on a Chadwick Tromp double play ball), and Marcell Ozuna in the fifth (leadoff single, went nowhere). Paxton didn’t issue his second walk until batter number 19, but that paid no dividends, either.
Ohtani collected his third hit, a weak flare into center, to lead off the sixth. Freddie Freeman then followed with a routine roller that was hit too weakly to become a double play, and then Fried hung a curveball to Teoscar Hernandez, who mashed it into a 4-0 game. Fried struck out the next two batters and actually ended up completing seven innings in what was ultimately a mixed bag outing (7/3 K/BB ratio good, two homers not good), but his performance really didn’t matter here.
The Braves finally chased Paxton after falling into that four-run deficit, but it wasn’t exactly in satisfying fashion. Matt Olson led off the seventh with a barreled liner into the gap, but got thrown out trying to stretch it into a double. Ozuna then followed with a homer, marking it the second time in this series that a Brave was thrown out on the bases immediately preceding a longball. After a single and Michael Harris II’s second consecutive hard-hit liner out to center, Joe Kelly came in and ended the frame by striking out Duvall. Technically, Duvall should’ve walked on the 3-1 pitch before he struck out, but Fried also benefited from some hilariously egregious calls in this one, so whatever.
Paxton wasn’t actually any good coming into this game, with a 5.57 FIP and 6.23 xFIP, and he wasn’t really any good in this game either, as he managed just a 3/2 K/BB ratio with a 30 percent grounder rate. But saying that the Braves weren’t able to take advantage really undercuts it — Olson’s blunder when he didn’t represent anything close to the tying run was pretty dumb, and Harris literally had three balls at 106 mph off the bat or higher with hit probabilities over 50 percent, each of which became an out.
After that, things kind of devolved into silly season. The Braves, who opted not to lift Fried before he had completed his third trip through the order in a two-run game, then decided that they should use A.J. Minter in a three-run game to face Ohtani and Freeman. That led to Ohtani’s second homer of the day to lead off the eighth, and after Olson booted a Hernandez grounder, Jesse Chavez had to come in and finish the frame. It likely doesn’t really matter from an availability perspective because of the off-day tomorrow, but the thought process eludes me nonetheless.
Another thing that eludes me: what Jarred Kelenic is doing at the plate. Kelenic pinch-hit for Tromp to start the eighth against Blake Treinen, who was making his first appearance since 2022. He worked a 3-1 count, and then swung at a high cutter after laying off two higher cutters. He then swung through an egregiously bad slider that was pretty close to hitting him in the leg, and the Braves went quietly against Treinen in the eighth and Michael Grove in the ninth.
The Braves will now fly home and enjoy a weird two off-day week that includes a two-game set against the Red Sox and a weekend set against the Mets. While the long-term outlook for the team is still the same as it’s ever been — just glance at all the other horrid West Coast trips, getting swept by the Astros as part of a four-game losing streak last April, the .500ish May they had last year en route to 104 wins, etc. etc. etc. — it’s still a bummer to be jostled out of leading the league in a bunch of stuff in such short order by a weeklong, almost team-wide offensive malaise. Things won’t necessarily get too much easier, as the Mets and Red Sox have two of the top six pitching staffs in baseball to date (though the Mets’ xFIP isn’t great by any stretch), but maybe the Braves will finally resolve their season-long-to-this-point struggle between hitting too many grounders and too many do-nothing fly balls and get back to mashing once they return home. We’ll see.