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Fried, Braves look to keep rolling, upend Christian Scott’s first home start

The Braves have bounced back from their problematic, 1-5 road trip about as well as possible, winning all three games since, and doing so in fairly convincing fashion by mixing effective run prevention with a spattering of homers. On Saturday afternoon, they’ll go for their fourth win in a row behind Max Fried, who was done in by two Dodger longballs last weekend.

Reports of this rotation’s impending demise following the season-ending injury to Spencer Strider were, in truly unsurprising fashion, greatly exaggerated. From April 15-onward, the Braves have a 62/97/87 pitching line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) from their starters; that xFIP- is a top-five mark. Move forward another week, and it’s 54/94/80, good for ninth in fWAR, despite the Braves (again/still) playing fewer games than pretty much every other team, even in that limited span. If you leave aside Bryce Elder, the four rotation mainstays don’t have a single ERA or ERA estimator above 4.00 since April 22.

That’ll do it (where “it” is put the team on track to win a bunch of games), but the Braves have also rebounded to hit seven homers in their last three games, including a three-homer inning in last night’s series-opening win.

Today, they’ll try to keep the homer-filled times rolling as they take aim at Christian Scott, who will be making his second career start, and first-ever in front of the Queens faithful. Scott’s MLB debut was quite successful, as he smothered the Rays with a 6/1 K/BB ratio, and was charged with just a lone run in 6 ²⁄₃ innings of work. In fact, his run in that outing was maybe even more impressive than what happened on paper: after three straight hits to begin his MLB career, he got a strikeout and a double play, and then also retired the next ten batters. For the rest of the outing, the only thing the Rays managed against him was a fifth-inning one-out single, a sixth-inning two-out walk, and finally a two-out single in the seventh that chased him from the game.

This level of success wasn’t necessarily surprising for Scott, who came into the season as a fringy Top 100 prospect guy (in fact, he is currently literally no. 100 on the FanGraphs prospect list). He’s neither a flamethrower nor a pitchability guy, but perhaps a happy medium: he has a hard, 95 mph fastball with good horizontal movement that he consistently gets to the top of the zone, and spins a breaker that he can either sweep or not, with good feel to get both variants to the gloveside edge. There’s also a split-change thing that he didn’t use very often against the Rays that Braves hitters will probably need to be aware of. Scott was homer-prone in five starts in Triple-A (5.09 FIP on a 3.36 xFIP), but largely cruised through the minors after being drafted in the fifth round in 2021.

On the flip side, though, the Mets’ average-y offense will have to contend with Max Fried, who continues to make hay after the miserable way his season started. Fried now has a 103/104/84 line on the year, and was even better before being stretched into completing seven innings last weekend in L.A. led to him giving up another homer and one of his three walks the third time through. The Mets have been quite good against left-handed pitching so far, with a sixth-best-in-MLB .344 xwOBA against him, but it’s not immediately evident because of a dramatic, .040-point underperformance in that regard that puts their wOBA against southpaws in the middle of the pack. Still, Fried has had few issues with these Mets in recent history — he’s dominated them in each of his last four starts (combined 21/2 K/BB ratio, one homer, seven total runs charged to him in 23 innings). He’s pretty much had just one maybe/probably bad outing against them in his career (last July), and even then, he had a nasty 5/5 K/BB ratio but still ended up being charged with just two runs in five innings of work.