A good verb to describe what the Braves did to the Fish tonight: “sonned.” Miami got sonned tonight, absolutely obliterated on every side of the ball.
Chris Sale did Chris Sale things – after giving up a sac fly in the first, he retired 18 of the last twenty men he faced, striking out eight while yielding no walks and just four singles, one in the third and one in the fourth. Ho hum. He’s a Hall of Famer, and it’s just hard to overstate what a privilege it is to watch a master at his craft.
And the offense went about its business as though offended that the Nationals actually have had a higher-scoring offense this year. (Astonishingly, tonight’s outburst only cut the deficit by one, as Washington beat IWOTM 8-4.)
The bats didn’t let the sole Marlin run go unanswered, as Ozzie Albies and Mauricio Dubon singled in front of a three-run Austin Riley home run. He’s raised his seasonal OPS by 80 points in the first few weeks of May. And it stayed 3-1 until the sixth, when things came unglued. First came four straight singles by the top of the lineup: Ronald, Michael, Matt, Ozzie.
And then up strode Dom Smith, who’s been a banjo hitter this month: coming into this game, he had 31 plate appearances in May, with eight singles and just one double and one walk, leading to the bizarre batting line of .310/.323/.345. Well, he fouled off seven pitches, worked the count to full, and then blasted the first curveball Junk threw him into the bleachers, blowing the game wide open.
He wasn’t quite done, either. In the eighth, he hit a ball nearly as hard but not quite as far. Remarkably, the Marlins outfielders managed to have a communications error – I don’t know how, there were fewer than 10,000 people at the game and you could just about hear a pin drop – and as they collided, the ball popped out and began to roll, and by the time just about every member of the team had kicked the ball three times, Dom Smith filled in the diamond on your scorecard and went to go suck wind in the dugout. The scorer credited him with a “triple,” which is charitable. He hit the snot out of that ball, though.
One more against these chuckleheads tomorrow, with yet another 6:40 start time, before the Braves get to fly the friendly skies back to sunny Cobb County, to play those slugging Natspos. (My thoughts: don’t throw strikes to James Wood.)
(JC’d myself). I hadn’t realized that Sale was the active LHP with the most wins, up to 151 after tonight’s game. Second is Jose Quintana with only 115. It looks to me like at the start of this season, Sale’s 144 wins were the fewest by the active LHP with the most wins in a long, long time, probably over 100 years. Kershaw retired at the end of last year, and before him Buehrle, Sabathia, and Petite all apparently had more at different times, and before them you get into Glavine & Randy Johnson, and there’s only a decade or so between them & the Carlton/Kaat generation, who weren’t too far after Warren Spahn, who wasn’t too far after Lefty Grove. I imagine there were others filling in the gaps.