I will keep talking about walks until they find a different way to score runs (namely, homers)
There are a lot of reasons why the baseball season is so long, but part of it is because each team is, no matter the circumstances of their season, going to get dealt a terrible hand of outcomes for a pretty substantial chunk of those games. The Braves didn’t exactly play well tonight in a 7-3 loss to the Mets, but this was clearly one of those games. Tonight’s result aside, that reality is why their season is in serious peril. It’s not that they lack the theoretical firepower to recover and make the playoffs, but it’s that, by the sheer laws of “stuff that is likely to happen over the remaining three months,” they’re just going to have too many of these games to make up the yawning deficit that looms over them in the standings. That, in and of itself, is not a strategic or tactical failure in a season that’s had way too many of them. That’s just baseball, and, at this point, the Braves will need to pull a very specific rabbit out of a very specific hat to overcome their poor results over the past three months.
Oh, right, but there was an actual baseball game with actual events to cover. Well, let me take a step back before getting into the details. The Braves finished this game with a 7/7 K/BB ratio. Yes, once again, they walked a bunch. Meanwhile, their pitchers struck out six Mets, and walked none. You’d think that knowing that and nothing else, the game would be closer than a four-run contest that was a six-run contest before some garbage time scoring in the ninth, but, well, nope. The Mets got the enviable combination of multiple homers and fortunate results when the ball stayed in the yard; the Braves got absolutely none of that despite their walks. So it goes.
If you were so inclined, you probably could’ve pegged the fact that this wasn’t the Braves’ night early on. After a one-out walk in the first, Marcell Ozuna bashed an 0-2 fastball at the top of the zone from Clay Holmes into left-center at 105 mph… only for it to be robbed of a potential homer by a leaping Jeff McNeil. The Braves aren’t exactly repeatedly getting the ball to the wall these days, so for one that could’ve left the yard and delivered multiple guaranteed runs to be robbed and turned into an out? Brutal.
Didier Fuentes got outs on a couple of hard-hit balls in a perfect first, and the Braves got another walk, ultimately squandered, in the second. The Mets attempted a rally with a couple of meh singles off Fuentes in the bottom half of the inning, but Brett Baty somehow turned a hanging sweeper right down the middle into a double play ball. There was another walk wasted by the Braves in the third, and, well, you get where this is going by now.
The Mets got on the board first, as the light-hitting Ronny Mauricio squeaked a full count fastball on the inner third over the right field fence on a cheapie homer. The Braves then got even on something very much not a cheapie, and honestly, one of the more impressive homers they’ve hit this season: Drake Baldwin somehow hit a slider at/below his knees 105 mph to dead center for a 433-foot homer. Wow. By the way, with Gabriel Moreno hurt, Baldwin should probably be part of the NL contingent at the All-Star Game, provided that MLB actually knows what it’s doing…
Anyway, that tie didn’t last long, because Juan Soto put the Mets back ahead with a homer on Fuentes’ very first pitch of the fourth, an elevated fastball on the far corner that Soto had absolutely no difficulty in destroying. At that point, the game had gotten away from the Braves, who were very unlikely to overcome allowing two longballs in one evening, but things got so much worse.
Fuentes barely clipped Pete Alonso with a pitch, and then McNeil followed with a “double” that had a hit probability of ten percent — except that hit probabilities aren’t accurate when your team insists on continuing to let Alex Verdugo “play” “left field.” Starling Marte followed with a barreled out sac fly, then there was a cheap seeing-eye single with the infield in, then a bloop single, then another seeing-eye single, and that was it for Fuentes.
This outing was definitely a step back from the one against the Marlins, but the Mets are a much better-hitting team (not that you’d necessarily know it from the last couple of weeks). In his first start, I was impressed with Fuentes’ command but bemused that he wasn’t missing bats despite having great stuff on paper; that “trend” continued tonight as he just didn’t really generate any meaningful whiffs, and finished with a 1/0 K/BB ratio (and that hit-by-pitch).
The Braves then inserted Aaron Bummer into a three-run game with the bases loaded and one out. Aaron Bummer has the most fWAR on the team among relievers (and is third among regular relievers in xFIP), but continues to be punished for some sort of secret transgression that we aren’t privy to. Bummer ultimately ended up pitching 2 2⁄3 innings with a 2/0 K/BB ratio, but two more Mets runs scored in the fourth on a sac fly and a single, neither well-struck.
The Braves had a vague chance to at least make a game of it against Holmes in the top of the fifth, as a walk and a single brought Ozuna and Riley up, but both just grounded out. The Mets lifted Holmes after five with a pathetic 2/4 K/BB ratio, but the Braves also pathetically didn’t really do anything after those four walks, so it was just kind of a sorry showing all around. Recently-recalled Brandon Waddell got the sixth and issued a leadoff walk to Baldwin, but Verdugo found a way to make his continued employment even more miserable by weakly hitting into an inning-ending double play.
The Braves “wasted” a Nick Allen single off Jose Butto in the seventh, and at that point it was full punt mode (in case Bummer’s appearance didn’t signal that), as Austin Cox came on for Atlanta and promptly surrendered another homer to Soto, this one on a 3-1 pitch down the middle. Ryne Stanek shut the Braves down in the eighth, an inning which also featured Michael Harris II robbing Francisco Lindor of a homer to center.
The ninth featured the Mets’ other recent call-up, Jonathan Pintaro, who also issued a leadoff walk. Verdugo followed with a bloop single, but the Braves made two outs before Acuña, who nearly got plastered in the face and then the hip area by a couple of Pintaro fastballs, ripped a two-run single to right. After the Braves’ seventh and final walk, the Mets removed Pintaro for Edwin Diaz, who hung a 2-1 slider to Ozuna that turned yet another weak grounder that ended the game.
The Braves will go for a series win tomorrow night behind Grant Holmes. If they don’t manage it, well, seasonal leverage is already not particularly high, so it won’t be a huge disappointment, but the mountain they need to scale just keeps growing with every loss, seemingly foreordained like tonight or not.