Single Post

Sale, Braves go for sweep and perhaps less dramatic win in Sunday matinee

After taking the series via consecutive dramatic comebacks, the Braves will look to polish off a sweep of the Diamondbacks on Sunday afternoon, and perhaps do so in less dramatic fashion.

Spencer Strider was charged with three in the first and two more in the fourth, forcing the offense to battle back from 3-0 and 5-2 deficits, which they managed handily, scoring three with their final six outs of regulation, and then walking the game off after Pierce Johnson’s excellent performance in Manfredball. Max Fried then made things even harder for his compatriots the next night, as the Braves ended up trailing by six before even coming to the plate, and an unfortunate throwing error put them in an 8-2 hole heading into the bottom of the fifth. But, seven unanswered runs over their next four offensive half-innings did the trick, and handed the series to the Braves.

So, on Sunday afternoon, the “challenge” of not digging a large hole for the offense to clamber out of early falls to Chris Sale, who will be making his second official start as a Brave. Sale’s first start went okay — a 7/2 K/BB ratio over 5 ¹⁄₃ innings — and was marked by him mostly cruising aside from a self-inflicted problem inning where he had a walk and a hit by pitch before recovering with a double play ball to minimize the damage. Amusingly, his Statcast, quality-of-contact-based xERA is a ghastly 9.01 right now, but that’s driven partly by the fact that over 40 percent of the contact he allowed in his first game against the Phillies resulting in high hit probability flares. On the flip side, Sale did have two barrels socked against him on 12 balls hit into the field of play, which isn’t great, but he’ll get a chance to lower said barrel rate that this time around.

The Diamondbacks will counter with Ryne Nelson, who had a nightmarish 2 ²⁄₃ innings of work in his season debut against the Yankees last Monday. Nelson managed just a 2/4 K/BB ratio, and while no one barreled a ball against him, he elicited just a single grounder (an RBI single) in his entire outing. He probably can’t afford to do anything similar against a Braves attack that has been downright savage in its persistence thus far.

If the Braves do sweep away the snakes, it won’t be any kind of remarkable event — they last did so at home as recently as 2022. More remarkable, at this point, would be winning in a fashion different than the prior two nights — maybe taking an early lead and holding it, for instance — or failing to come back in a loss.