Basking in the glow of Yale’s opening day win over the College of the Holy Cross, I never glommed onto the fact that the start time of this game was moved up a half-hour, so I missed the first two innings. The Braves offense waited for me, with the first run of the game scoring off a broken-bat hit from Ronald Acuña Jr. which scored Gore Bruján, who was starting because somewhere in the celebration over his breakout game yesterday, Nacho Alvarez Jr. cut his thumb, apparently not seriously. (No Bob Ojeda, Mordecai Brown or Jason Pierre-Paul.) “Alvarez has indicated he does not know how the injury happened and confirmed it was not from celebrating.” Let me just say that the fact that you don’t know how you cut yourself means it was from celebrating.

In the 4th inning, Ha-Seong Kim continued his show of respect for Scott Boras’ bank account by hitting another homer, making it 2-0. In the fifth, Drake Baldwin got his first career triple which required Matt Olson to score in front of him from first. The play used up the half-hour that the game time was moved up. 3-0.

Spencer Strider threw 101 pitches for five scoreless innings without a single clean inning. That’s what happens to teams that are in slumps. The Braves, cruelly, added three runs in the 9th to set up the sweep. Dylan Dodd came on and promptly gave up a walk and two straight hits to spoil the shutout. A sac fly brought in another run, and. then, Iggy.

Stretch Runs

We aren’t in one (except against the Marlins for third place) but that doesn’t mean that my acute schadenfreude senses aren’t twitching madly. Whatever low point was reached today by Detroit in being swept by the Braves doesn’t really excite me one way or another. But the Mets lead for the last playoff spot is gone. They lost to the gNats today while the Reds swept Chicago to take the tiebreaker lead for the last spot. The Mets finish with three in Wrigley and three in Miami. Cincinnati has Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, Arizona, barely alive, finishes like we started: the Dodgers and Padres. Obviously, the schedule doesn’t favor the Diamondbacks, but if there’s any justice in the world (is there? I am clueless on this) they should get the last playoff spot that was denied them last year with the highly convenient Braves-Mets split of their last-day doubleheader last year. If nothing else, that ought to be a newly-imposed tiebreaker.

Statistical Anomaly

Starting a game and pitching no clean innings while allowing no runs through 5 or more innings is pretty rare. I have it happening 832 times in MLB history before this year. It was the 25th time in Braves history, with Spencer Schwellenbach and Reynaldo Lopez having accomplished this last year.

But most of these are pitchers who pitched 5 or 6 innings. The really rare feat is to do this and pitch into the 9th or 10th inning. That brings up a game ububba probably went to. Tom Glavine took on the Yankees and pitched 9 scoreless innings without a clean inning among them. Unfortunately, Kenny Rogers stymied the Braves as well. Mike Bielecki replaced Glavine in the 10th and gave up 4 straight singles to give the Yankees a 1-0 win.