So long and thanks for all the fly balls
The Braves — well, really, Sean Murphy — outhomered the Cardinals 2-0 in this game, but rather than a laugher, Friday night’s win ended up being a 6-5 squeaker in which no team scored after the third inning. The Braves were aided by a late streak of eight straight outs-at-the-plate on harmless fly balls by St. Louis, until Raisel Iglesias struck out the final batter of the game to seal the victory.
The Braves got started very early in this one against Matthew Liberatore, who has had a mini-breakout campaign so far in 2025, but had struggled in his last two starts. Ronald Acuña Jr. doubled to start the game, and scored on an Austin Riley bloop single into center. That brought up Sean Murphy, who did the thing he was acquired to do — take a big-ass swing on an 0-2 pitch and absolutely crush an elevated slider for a monster homer to left center.
Unfortunately, this was not one of Grant Holmes’ exemplary starts, so the 3-0 lead didn’t stay comfy for long. A weak single, a hard-hit double, and a seeing-eye single made it 3-2 in short order, though Holmes was able to staunch the bleeding with a strikeout before Willson Contreras got thrown out trying to take second on some kind of weird delayed steal-slash-attempt to advance on a bobble by catcher Drake Baldwin.
The Braves then went right back to work — Michael Harris II crushed a double, and then Acuña drove him in on a weird play where he only got a single even though the ball rolled down the left-field line and caromed. The Cardinals and Holmes then combined for a bizarre half-inning where the exit velocities were 66, 76, 46, 43, 90, and 83 mph — the 46 was a bunt (but the 43 wasn’t!) — but didn’t score despite three singles because the last two of this set of weakly-hit balls were both easy pop-outs.
Murphy then showed his disgust at whatever happened in the bottom of the second by capping off a 13-pitch battle with Liberatore with his second big-ass swing and monstrous shot of the day, this time to dead center. His first went 437 feet, this one went 440 feet, yay Sean Murphy. A couple of 50-50 hits by Jurickson Profar (double) and Drake Baldwin (single) scored a sixth Atlanta run. A walk and a sac bunt brought Harris up, and his season continued to just be sad, as he hit a routine fly ball that turned into a double play when Baldwin was thrown out trying to tag up and score.
The bottom of the third was quite sour. Coming into this game, Grant Holmes had a 2.57 FIP and 3.00 xFIP the first time through, with his FIP and xFIP swelling to above 5.00 and above 4.00 afterwards, respectively. At this point, I don’t begrudge the Braves trying to see if Holmes can ever grow into more than a really cool 1TTO fireman type, because they have so little to lose, but the day may come where they need to rely on him as something other than a “go throw 100 pitches” starter. Anyway, you can tell by my digression that the second time through did not go well for Holmes. He retired none of the lefties he faced in the inning (double, two walks), leading to a situation where the bases were loaded with two outs for Pedro Pages (not a lefty), who nonetheless smashed a single to make it 6-4. Holmes and his defense then completed the feat of not retiring any lefties 2TTO as Victor Scott II singled to make it 6-5. Mercifully, with Holmes still out there for batter number 19, Brendan Donovan hit a very weak grounder to end the inning with the Braves still ahead.
At this point, the game became a bullpen battle, and no more runs scored. That’s some kind of commentary on relievers being better in aggregate than starters, or something. For the Cardinals, it was Riley O’Brien, Matt “Vampire Dansby Swanson” Svanson, JoJo Romero, and Phil Maton tossing six innings with a 9/1 K/BB ratio. The Braves only threatened again in the fifth (single, double, later a walk, but otherwise a failure to plate any runners) and the ninth (Acuña’s leadoff double, going nowhere).
For the Braves, the bullpen slate was Enyel De Los Santos (two perfect frames, save a throwing error by Luke Williams, who replaced Austin Riley after the latter departed with ab tightness, whatever that means), Austin Cox, Rafael Montero, and Iglesias. Cox had a very quick and easy inning in the sixth, but then walked the first guy he faced in the seventh; Montero came on, suffered a =single, but then got three straight weak flyouts. Pierce Johnson got two more fly outs of his own, as well as picking off a batter he walked. The second of those two flyouts was actually a barreled out, and while it’s way too late for me to thank the baseball gods for not letting HR/FB burn the Braves on this particular occasion, well, at least they kept the lead this time. Iglesias finished off the game with an at-’em ball at Harris in center, another weak fly out (thus completing the streak of eight straight Cardinals outs at the plate all being in the air), and then blew away Contreras with a fastball to end the game.
The Braves’ bullpen didn’t really excel in this one, with just a 2/2 K/BB ratio, but anyone can look good over six innings when the fly balls are harmlessly finding gloves over and over. Sean Murphy is even cooler than that, though. Stay tuned for tomorrow, or not, I guess.