The first pitch of tonight’s game featured a high nineties fastball from Folty that was  RDBM into AJ’s waiting glove. He didn’t have to move it an inch.He dropped it.

More of that was to come, from many a Brave, and so a magnificent 7 innings of finely wrought mayhem was wasted. He controlled his pitches better than his emotions in the 8th when things started to unravel with a horrible call but it was heartening to watch what had gone before. He even drove in an ‘insurance’ run late to pad AJ’s early 2 run homer into a 3/0  lead. Not enough as it turned out as we dribbled/ booted/wild pitched/threw away/  pass balled/misplayed balls like the Keystone Cops – except it wasn’t funny. RDBM? In these instances, no. Freddy even misplayed a not entirely unreasonable throw with his nose – perhaps he had seen too much, lost trust in the leather. It was a big play.

Colorado were 0 and 43 in games where they came into the seventh innings behind. Chip said so, twice.No more.

There is one other reason we lost tonight which had nothing to do with defense. Blind draw one name at random from your current 9 who must then come to the plate in a late high pressure situation. Or two. Or three. For the Rockies the odds would be good at least 2 and maybe all 3 you could legitimately call ‘hitters’. For the Braves? Maybe one.So when trouble struck in the eighth, the  lead then evaporated and almost immediately we were behind one run going into the bottom of the ninth what did we think was going/not going to happen? And it did/didn’t.

Never mind. We must remind ourselves of the hackneyed truism that W/L records for us right now mean much less for the future than the kind of performance Folty put on today. Against an outstanding hitting team he went into the 8th giving up only one legitimate hit and that to a guy leading the league in average. Awesome, exciting.And back to back.