In this game, one team had eight hits, a sacrifice fly, numerous nifty defensive plays, and took a few risks on the bases. The other team had two homers. You can pretty much figure it out from there: yes, it’s 2024, but two homers are hard to overcome when you hit none, and so the Braves fell by a 4-2 score to the Giants in their July 4 matchup.
After a double play-aided 1-2-3 inning from Charlie Morton to start the game, the Braves jumped out to an early lead against Logan Webb. Jarred Kelenic had a single back up the box, and Ozzie Albies curled in a fly ball off the wall. The relay throw home short-hopped the cutoff man, and with some heads-up baserunning, Kelenic scored. After a perfect donut hole bloop by Matt Olson put runners on the corners, Austin Riley hit (of course) a barreled out to left that went for a sacrifice fly.
Morton made that lead stand up for a while, with just a hit-by-pitch over his next two frames. Forrest Wall reached on an infield single slash defensive misplay in the third, but was thrown out trying to steal second to end that inning.
In the fourth, the Giants got all they needed. After a bloop single to start the inning, Heliot Ramos annihilated a 1-0 down-the-middle cutter to deep center to tie the game. Six pitches later, Matt Chapman got a first-pitch down-the-middle cutter and followed Ramos’ lead, this time to left center. The Braves had shed both the lead and the tie in the span of a few pitches. Later in the inning, Morton hit another batter, but was able to get out of it thanks to a diving stop by Ozzie Albies that turned into the third out.
The Braves tried to strike back almost immediately, as Webb issued a leadoff walk to Olson in the bottom of the fourth, and Riley hit a hard liner into the left-field corner. The Braves, perhaps playing against type because of how their season has gone, opted to send Olson, which resulted in him getting gunned down on the relay throw. It arguably may not have mattered, because the next two batters proceeded to ground out and strike out. That was really it as far as credible Braves threats went, though.
The Giants added a fourth run and capped the scoring in the sixth due to a weird sequence that probably further called into question the whole Zack Short, shortstop thing. First, Ramos reached on a ball past Short that even Orlando Arcia probably (?) doesn’t get to. Then, Patrick Bailey hit a ball off Morton’s back that caromed right to Riley, who threw to Short for one out. However, Short airmailed the relay throw. Chapman followed with a check-swing roller down the right-field line that went for a double. After falling behind Michael Conforto, and giving him the fourth ball intentionally, the Braves lifted Morton, whose final line featured a 5/2 K/BB ratio, but two hit batters and of course, the two homers. Grant Holmes came in and was pretty much incredible, allowing just a walk and another weakly hit roller double while striking out four of the ten batters he faced.
With nothing else really happening in the game, my mind started to wander into why the Braves went from David Fletcher to Luis Guillorme to Zack Short. The latter has poor defensive ratings everywhere except second base, where he’s just been average, and had a disastrous stint at shortstop in 2021, when he wasn’t yet knocking on the door of his third decade of life. He also doesn’t add anything offensively, so it just seems like the Braves unnecessarily handcuffed themselves here. Meanwhile, Grant Holmes is out of options and likely doesn’t figure into the long-term plans of the club — why not use him to take the heat and workload off the starters given that he’s dominated pretty much every hitter he’s faced so far?
Anyway, back to the game, I guess. The Braves did nothing for most of the rest of it. They got a leadoff single in the sixth when Albies scooped a pitch off the dirt and looped it into left, but Marcell Ozuna hit a ball right back to Webb for a double play. Sean Murphy had a two-out single in the seventh, but Wall struck out looking to end Webb’s night. They did nothing against Tyler Rogers in the eighth, and though Ozuna reached on another defensive misplay by the Giants in the ninth, Camilo Doval was easily able to shut the door with two strikeouts sandwiching a groundout.
The result wasn’t really surprising, and the banged-up Braves continue to essentially tread water, as they’ve now alternated series wins and losses over their last four series, and are a game below .500 since the start of May. Maybe they’ll actually hit some homers against the Phillies.
