Padres 2, Braves 1

The offense (mercifully) showed signs of life on Friday and Saturday, but it went back into the doldrums tonight in a 2-1 nationally-televised defeat. Most of that was due to the performance of Yu Darvish, who threw by far his best game of the young season (he had allowed nine runs in 7.2 innings over his previous two starts). Darvish allowed just a single run on a Marcell Ozuna solo shot in the top of the seventh and allowed four hits over 6.2 innings, striking out eight without a walk.

The Braves actually outhit the Padres 4-3 in this game, but the Padres brought a pair of runs across in the second with not much more than a couple of singles. Ha-Seong Kim and C.J. Abrams provided the only two hits of the frame, but San Diego followed that with a walk and a hit batsman to force in a run, and a force out to score another.

This brings up the travails of Bryce Elder, who was not as sharp as he’d been in his first start. He allowed those two runs on five walks and three hits over 4.1 innings. All-in-all, I thought he did a pretty decent job of limiting damage. He left with a runner on first and one out in the fifth, and Spencer Strider entered and immediately induced a double-play grounder. He went the rest of the way and did nothing to dampen any enthusiasm for his prospects. He didn’t allow a hit or a run over the final 3.2 innings that the Braves spent in the field and kept the Padres well within range. The Braves just couldn’t get much of anything off of Darvish or the relievers that followed.

So it’s a brief trip up I-5 to take on the Dodgers and one Freddie Freeman for the first time this season. It’ll be interesting to see how that series plays out, but the Braves have been showing some signs of settling in. They played their best two games of the year so far Friday and Saturday, and a four-game split out of this series strikes me as a decent result, even with the disaster on Thursday and the tepid offensive performance tonight.

Let’s go take a(nother) series from the Dodgers!

11 thoughts on “Padres 2, Braves 1”

  3. I thought Elder did a great job of at least keeping the team in it, despite obvisouly not having good command of his stuff. Time and time again we’ve seen an outing like that go really bad… really quickly, and it shows how mature he is that he was able to fight enough to get into the fifth. If the offense would’ve been able to figure out Darvish, the conversation would be completely different regarding Elder.

    My other takeaways from last night: Spencer Strider is pretty incredible, and I find it absolutely crazy that just last year I was watching him pitch against Bowling Green at the High-A level. I heard on the Rates & Barrell podcast that his Stuff+ rating was otherworldly coming into last night’s game. Idk what ATL should do with him long-term? Should he close?… should he start? I’m kind of interested to see him start a game here soon, while he’s stretched out and pitching so well.

    Tough loss last night, but man Darvish was nasty. You’re either gonna crush him… or he’s gonna be nearly unhittable. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between with him

  4. Overall encouraging performances on the mound, but a tough loss.

    Let’s take the Chavez Ravine series & come home with a winning road trip.

  5. I have one free ticket available for each the Friday and Saturday game against the Marlins.
    Section 237 on Fri and 113 on Sat. Happy to transfer to anyone interested to go via ticketmaster.

  7. Feels to me like Elder will get the “Muller” treatment. Muller was not too bad for five starts last year and hasn’t seen the majors since. I’d rather see Ynoa go down (when Acuna is activated) and get himself good again. But Ynoa has one option and Elder has three. I still think it will be Newk that gets DFA’d if a 40-man roster slot is need for someone or when rosters go to 26 (along with another pitcher getting optioned).

    The whole point of the 28 man roster was to keep more pitchers so it’s likely that we will go from 16 to 14 pitchers. If they bring back the 13 pitcher limit then someone else might get DFA’d (Stephens? Thornburg?).

  9. Crap! I guess I should’ve looked at Darvish’s game-by-game rather than quickly extrapolating based on his year-to-date stats. He was pulled from his first game with a no-hitter through six innings. Now he did walk four in that game, so maybe it’s arguable last night was still his best game of the year thus far, but it definitely wasn’t so by far. He jammed all of his awful into his second start of the year.

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