A Jarred Kelenic sighting! His three-run homer accounted for the winning margin, notwithstanding an insurance run in the sixth that narrowly snapped the offense out of Hibernation Mode.

I finally figured it out. Kelenic is the outfield version of Orlando Arcia: a onetime top-10 prospect with strong up-the-middle defense, whose frustrating major league offensive performance finally led his original team to give up on him and trade him to the Braves for a reliever and a pitching prospect. Ultimately, while their tools tantalize, their indifferent plate discipline and strike zone management limit their ceiling and they generally settle in as something like a 1.5-2.0 win player, which is acceptable enough if you lower your expectations sufficiently and bat them low enough in the lineup.

Kelenic is still young enough that he could get better, but his strikeout rate needs to come way the hell down. Right now, he’s striking out 4.6 times for every walk. That’s about the same as Michael Harris, who has missed one-third of the team’s games and whose offensive performance has clearly been hampered by injuries. Kelenic will never be more than he is, a fringy second-division starter, without improving his strike zone control, even just to the point of making more contact. (His walk rate this year is a career-low. I’m willing to chalk that up to a frustrated desire to impress his new teammates, but he’s got to do better there, too.)

All in all, last night was what you want to see: the Braves took a ton of walks, greeted a rookie starter extremely roughly, and handled the Rockies’ poor lineup with aplomb, as Dylan Lee, Pierce Johnson, Joe Jimenez, and Raisel Iglesias combined four four no-hit innings in relief of Uncle Charlie Morton, whose 5-inning, two-run start was about as good as we can hope from him these days.

If you’re a good team, beating bad teams is the baseline. You’ve got to take care of business against these guys. One more against them, and then we can go get revenge on Dave Winfield.