The Milwaukee Brewers are currently the talk of the baseball world. They’re currently in possession of the best record in baseball, they’ve been an absolute buzzsaw in recent weeks and have taken on all comers and usually ended up bludgeoning them in the process. Milwaukee has been playing some fantastic baseball as of late and it’s a credit to Pat Murphy and the Brewers organization that they’ve been able to continue playing at a high level despite being written off a bit for the past couple of offseasons.
With all of that being said, this was probably the worst time for the Atlanta Braves to run into a team like this. Now granted, the Braves just got done lifting a piece of metal following their series win over Cincinnati over this past weekend so it’s not like Atlanta was exactly moribund in the immediate run-in to this series. When it comes to the medium-term (since the All-Star break) they’ve definitely been limping around though, as they’ve gone 5-10 in their past 15 games. Considering how the Brewers have been hitting and considering the state of Atlanta’s pitching staff, this was going to be a tough task for the Braves to figure out and sure enough, it ended up being a bit too tough for them to handle. Let’s get this over with.
It’s not an Atlanta Braves series without at least one one-run loss, so Atlanta got it out of the way early on in this series. Erick Fedde delivered a decent performance of his own, which was actually a bit impressive considering his history against certain hitters in Milwaukee’s lineup and his recent run of poor results.
However, a three-run homer from Issac Collins on a sweeper that swept right into the heart of the zone was enough to overturn what was a one-run deficit after Jurickson Profar led off the game with a dinger for Atlanta. That leadoff dinger ended up being the extent of Atlanta’s offense on the night – the Braves had a leadoff runner in the eighth but two hard-luck outs from Drake Baldwin and Sean Murphy ended that chance and was ultimately as close as the Braves would get to defeating the Brewers on the night.
This game was simply a matter of one team taking their chances at the plate like they’ve done consistently over recent weeks and the other team squandering them — I’ll let you guess which team is which. The Braves had two separate scoring opportunities with the bases loaded and came away with a grand total of one (1) run from those opportunities and it was a bases-loaded walk from Eli White. In fact, White was responsible for the other run that Atlanta scored, as he crushed a dinger out to left field to give Atlanta their first run of the night.
By the time Eli White homered, it was 4-1 and the Brewers were already out of sight. The crushing blow came in the sixth inning, which is when Issac Collins and Brice Turang combined to get the run back and then following a squandered bases-loaded opportunity for Atlanta, the Brewers broke it open with another big RBI knock from Collins that made it a 7-1 game. I told y’all about the bases-loaded walk that got Atlanta to two runs and that was basically it for the night. The Braves simply got outclassed by Freddy Peralta and company.
Here’s a quote from Spencer Strider during last night’s post game press conference when he was asked about his performance last night after his long layoff:
I actually think I commanded [the slider] really well but there were two that weren’t perfect and were homers. I think there were three that I didn’t execute well, which is a really good percentage. The odds of those two being homers, that’s the risk you run when you don’t execute.
That’s about the size of it. He also went on to explain something that’s pretty clear based on what we’ve seen over these past couple of days: This Brewers team is a really, really good ballclub. They knocked him around for 11 hits and four of the five runs Milwaukee scored came off of extra-base hits. As he mentioned in the quote, the two homers he gave up to Andrew Vaughn and Blake Perkins were both sliders that were left hanging in the no-no zone that good hitters can crush. The Brewers have plenty of good hitters and they crushed it. Simple as that.
Fortunately, the Braves had a bit of fight in them but it’s clear that they just don’t have the horses for this — not against a Brewers team of this quality. It was certainly encouraging to see Jurickson Profar launch his second homer of the series and Michael Harris II hit a ninth-inning dinger with two outs that brought temporary hope that we could’ve seen this game go to extras. However, the Braves went quietly after the homer and succumbed to yet another one-run loss.
While the Braves did suffer the indignity of continuing to add onto their ever-growing number of one-run losses during this nightmarish season, they would also fool you into thinking that this was a series where the Braves really went toe-to-toe with the best team in baseball. Atlanta had a lead for a grand total of four (4) innings in this series — they kept Milwaukee scoreless for the first three innings of the series opener after Jurickson Profar’s leadoff homer and then Atlanta ended the first inning of the series finale on top by a run before the Brewers immediately tied it up. That was as close as the Braves got at any point of actually winning a game in this series, as Milwaukee was largely in control for vast stretches of this series.
Again, this was the result that you’d expect when a hot team that’s been taking care of business runs into a team that’s been stumbling about for months now. Nothing in this series was particularly shocking — Atlanta simply got outclassed by a much better team and the results showed. Unfortunately, things aren’t going to get much easier for the Braves going forward. They now have five games against a Marlins team that’s doing pretty well themselves. I can actually remember writing earlier this season about how the Braves getting five games at home against the Marlins would actually provide for them an oasis during their potential playoff push. Well, as the saying goes, “Baseball man plans while the Baseball Gods laugh.” Atlanta’s going to be in for a fight over the next for days and that’s after they just lost a fight to a buzzsaw from Wisconsin.