The Braves endured “one of those days” on Sunday, falling 6-2 to the Washington Nationals to halt their winning streak at seven games and finish the six-game homestand 5-1. The homestand will still go down as an outstanding one overall, but Sunday’s game got away from starter Bryce Elder in the sixth inning.
The Braves held a 2-1 lead entering the inning, but the Nats recorded a Luis Garcia double, an advancement on a wild pitch, a Joey Meneses RBI single and a Jeimer Candelario two-run homer before Elder recorded an out. All that gave them a 4-2 lead. Two batters later, a Keibert Ruiz single ended Elder’s day after allowing eight hits in 5.1 innings. Kirby Yates came on in relief and promptly gave up another two-run homer to Dominic Smith, giving the visitors a 6-2 lead and closing the book on Elder’s outing with five runs allowed.
The home side got off to a good start in the first inning. Ronald Acuna doinked an infield single to third and Matt Olson followed with at least his second home run of the season onto the roof of the Chop House. With an early 2-0 advantage, the Braves proceeded to drop into Hibernation Mode for the remainder of the game. They collected seven hits after the Olson home run, but didn’t put much together in the way of threatening rallies. In a notable exception, they loaded the bases with two out in the fourth, but were unable to expand their two-run lead.
Elder suffered his first loss of the season Sunday, and he’s looked vulnerable now in each of his last two outings (he allowed four runs and two homers in six innings earlier in the week against the Mets). He was bound to have at least a brief downturn at some point, but I think it bears watching. He did only strike out one batter on Sunday, marking the first time this season that he’s collected that few.
The Marlins continue to be annoying, as they came off the mat today to beat the White Sox and pull back to within 3.5 games. Still, the Braves are now tied with Arizona for the best record in the National League and they just ended an undeniably successful homestand. They now travel to Detroit for three games before returning to Truist Park on Thursday to start another homestand against Colorado.
Sweeping both the Mutts and the gNats would’ve been great, but I’ll take a 5-1 homestand every day of the week.
If you send a starter back out to face an order for a third time, you’d better make sure that you’ve got someone warming in the pen. That’s especially true if said starter didn’t exactly dominate the opposing batters the first two times through the order. This is a lesson that our manager just refuses to understand. Yeah, Elder was fine through the first 5 innings, but it’s not like he was lights out or anything.
Anyway, the Braves are still in a great position heading into this series against Detroit. We’ve got the best record in the NL, 89.6% division odds, and a pretty favorable schedule throughout the remainder of this month.
Agreed…we seem to get burned the third time through the order at times when it isn’t Strider, Morton or Fried pitching. In particular the “younger” pitchers like Schuster, Dodd and Elder (at times) seem to have been more vulnerable the third time through the order. I have no data to support this theory, just a hunch.
The numbers do support the idea that our younger starters get burned the third time through the order, particularly Elder and Shuster:
Elder:
1st time: 0.62 ERA, 2.62 FIP, 3.10 xFIP,
2nd time: 2.70 ERA, 4.24 FIP, 3.72 xFIP,
3rd time: 6.00 ERA, 4.72 FIP, 4.68 xFIP,
Shuster:
1st time: 5.27 ERA, 5.47 FIP, 7.06 xFIP (oof)
2nd time: 3.18 ERA, 3.80 FIP, 5.18 xFIP,
3rd time: 10.80 ERA (oof again), 4.27 FIP, 7.44 xFIP,
I probably was a little too harsh in my assessment of Snitker as being someone who “refuses” to learn about the times through the order penalty. There have been plenty of times where he’s seemingly paid attention to it and made good tactical decisions. Personally, I just feel that he isn’t consistent with it and sometimes is too preoccupied with saving the bullpen.
This phenomenon is certainly not unique to the Braves. Many managers across MLB make similar decisions. Snitker definitely has had his great moments (the 2021 postseason in particular). I just tend to get a little frustrated at times.
This is really just me venting. I certainly have no intention of trashing Snitker or starting a debate. Ever since discovering this site a couple of months ago, I have really appreciated all the Braves coverage and conversations here!
This is a lesson that our manager just refuses to understand.
It’d be an interesting research project to determine if any successful team actually manages their starter/bullpen workloads the way that fans on the internet seem to want them to.
For whatever reason, my comment didn’t include my italics signifying that the first sentence was quoted. I’m also not getting a “click to edit” option.
I just went in and fixed. Seems like the [i] tag does not italicize in our present theme, while the [em] tag does. No worries!
We just can’t ask the bullpen to cover 4+ innings 3 out of every 5 games, and warming a guy up isn’t much different from using him. Some of these guys are going to have to go longer than optimal. Snit is nothing if not a big picture guy.
This. Cant manage every game like it’s a playoff game.
Admittedly, my comment was a bit of an overreaction to yesterday’s loss. Like you said, we cannot expect the bullpen to cover 4-5 innings every night. That is absolutely valid.
However, I do think that some consideration should be given to leverage and that, whenever possible, the Braves should avoid sending their starter back out if he’s about the face the order for a third time and it’s also a high leverage situation. Yesterday was a great example of this — Elder went back out to face the order a third time in the 6th inning of a 2-1 game. That’s a fairly high leverage spot. The leverage was even higher when Meneses tied the game.
I realize that what I said in my initial comment is pretty unrealistic, and what I SHOULD have said is that the Braves should consider leverage, handedness, and other factors when determining if a starter should keep pitching or not.
Our starters combined only struck out 3 batters the whole series. To the Nats credit, their batters have the fewest strikeouts in the NL.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/stats/team/_/teams/8/table/batting/sort/strikeouts/dir/desc
Yeah, but the Nats are 20th in runs scored. In their case, strikeouts don’t give the full story.