Braves vs.Red Sox Series Finale will be an interesting one as it will be a bullpen game for the Braves and the first out of the chute is Dylan Lee. The Red Sox will counter with Brayan Bello, dangerously close to Brian Fellows who is one of my favorite SNL characters in history. Bello has given up 5 HRs in 23.1 innings, which is about 2 per game and I’m sure the Braves will be seeing if they can make those numbers look worse for him.
It should be an all hands on deck day for the bullpen. I’m guessing they’ll try to get 2 innings out of each arm and finish with Raisel Iglesias.
Braves vs. Red Sox Lineups
It’s a great day as Travis D’Arnaud and Sean Murphy are both in the lineup.
In case you missed it, the carousel is about to start swirling and here are some candidates for the ride.
My guess is Lee is first as he’s left-handed and just about every pitcher after will be right-handed. Trying to get the Sox lineup turned around. I bet McHugh and Chavez are next and they might go more than two if the game is going well. If Lee/McHugh/Chavez gets us to the 7th or 8th then Minter/Iglesias will follow. If we see anyone but those five, I’m guessing the game will not be going well.
Surely the Braves will continue to adopt the “score more than the opposition” approach to the 2023 season…
Get well soon Max
Minter has as good of stuff as anyone but seems to get in his own way a ton. But again, still not sure why he was pitching last night in an 8-2 game when we knew it was a bullpen game today.
Strider is pitching Friday and Elder Saturday. No announcement on Sunday’s starter, and it seems like Morton will be pushed back to the next series. The timing seems like it might be Soroka making the Sunday start.
If we get Michael Harris hitting and average production in left field, that may be one of the most potent lineups Atlanta has fielded in a long time.
This sucks, man. And Ian Anderson was also in our plans to some extent as well. So that’s 3 starters down. And I don’t know how you want to look at Soroka, but at the end of the day, if he’s healthy, he’s in Atlanta. And he’s not. So that’s 4 starters down. Almost every organization but ours could not recover from this. For me, hoping for Soroka to stay healthy upon his return is the “break glass incase of emergency” situation, and it looks like we’ll have to hope for that now.
I want this run to continue, so I don’t think we should trade any more prospects for anybody. So I don’t think we should trade for anybody. We’re just going to have to get through 2+ months with Strider, Morton, Elder, Soroka, Dodd, and… Shuster? Not great, Bob.
Good thing our entire lineup is now both healthy and productive.
The current problem with Soroka is not so much that he’s not healthy and more than he’s both rusty and not built back up to carry an MLB starter’s innings load.
I have zero informed opinion on any given prospect, but whether or not it makes sense to trade always hinges on what you can get for what you’re willing to part with, which includes future value. If a good deal in the aggregate could be had, why not go for it?
Elder continues to impress. He needs another few good months to consider him a dependable 3rd or 4th starter for the long haul. 1 of Soroka, Dodd, or Schuster should turn out to be at least a good 5th starter. That leaves us with a need for 1 more starter. I think we need to make a trade. I don’t think we can get too much for Grissom with his defensive liabilities, even at 2nd. Beyond Grissom and starters, I don’t think we have too many trade pieces.
Minter is just a dumpster fire right now. Like “Wild Thing” Vaughn before the Indians turned around their season. He may well bear primary responsibility for one-third of this team’s losses once tonight is done.
That is certainly an accurate statement
I mean it didn’t matter, but I don’t understand why we never ran Ronald there.
At the end of the day, giving up five runs in a starterless bullpen game isn’t an awful outcome; the reason we lost yesterday is we scored two runs, one of them a solo moonshot to lead off an inning. The team went 1-6 with RISP, and left five men on base. It was just an off night for the offense. The only thing to be worried about, really, is what I wrote about Minter yesterday: “Let’s hope he’s just scuffling and not hurt.”
I agree. I really want to blame Minter and to a lesser extent Iglesias but scoring only two runs doesn’t give any room to blame except the offense. I feel like I was pretty correct in my estimation of the situation. We only saw pitchers other than what I mentioned after the Sox scored runs. Young may have been in the plan but the only reason we saw Anderson and Jimenez is that neither Minter nor Iglesias could finish a whole inning.
I think Minter’s problems are more related to pitch selection and command. Minter’s performance turned when TdA went down. So I think his issues will clear when he gets going and TdA trains up Murphy on how to use Minter.Everyone knows that his cutter/slider whatever you want to call it is never a strike so he has t depend on using the FB and CU to get early strikes so that the cutter/slider will generate swings and misses.