On nights where the offense puts up double digits it is often easy to overlook the job the pitching staff puts in. Tonight, we played the Lopes. Back that up and let me explain.

Many years ago I was playing at the World Open chess tournament. I was nothing special and nobody was likely to notice me except that my sister had come along as she had never been to a chess tourney and wanted to see one. As we look nothing alike and I am not particularly talkative during events, the others came to 2 conclusions: I must actually be something special AND I had a groupie.

This was long ago in an era of overwhelming maleness in chess: in a tournament that boasted close to 2k participants I would hazard a guess that there were fewer than 10 female players. So not only was I special but every player there felt that clearly they were both superior to me and deserving of some of that fine groupie interest for themselves.

The best of them in my book was Portas. Portas was a youngish man from Peru (who I would later meet from time to time at various events, nice guy) who looked like Snoop Dogg would look if he were 30 years old, mestizo and from Peru. He confidently walked up to my sister and declared, “I play the Lopes,” in a particularly deep and oily voice. And really, with a come-on line like that how could he fail? (Spoiler alert: he failed)

Ever since I have patiently waited for the day when the Braves would employ someone with the correct name AND I needed to make a game writeup of a thoroughly workmanlike performance.Thanks Portas!

As to the game. The Lopes was as good as one can be without having really good stuff. While he got one pitch up to 98.8 mph he was mostly in the 92-3 range. Fortunately, as he was pretty good at spotting the offspeed stuff juuuust far enough out of the middle to be effective, tonight’s velocity was enough. We can only hope Grant plays the Lopes tonight.

Other takeaways:

Michael Harris II had some really good at bats and stung several balls, one for a double. In the big 5th inning he took a couple of pitches down and away that he never would have laid off of last season.

Austin Riley looks to be in bad Francoeur mode: he isn’t quite catching up with good fastballs and is then flailing badly on offspeed stuff because he is starting his swing early. He fixed this exact problem a few years back by lowering his hands slightly while moving them a bit closer to his body. We shall continue to monitor this.

8 walks, enough said.