Win, win, win.

This game was uneventful until it wasn’t. RBI singles by Dominic Smith in the 2nd and 4th gave the Braves a 2 – 0 lead, which they held until the bottom of the 8th when Pete Alonso hit a solo home run off Dylan Lee.

One of my pet peeves is when people say, “You can’t charge an error if the player doesn’t touch the ball.” Leody Taveras‘s 1-out routine ground ball directly to Ozzie Albies looked to render a 9th inning lead-off walk by Raisel Iglesias harmless until the ball went directly under Ozzie’s glove and through his legs instead of turning into a potential game ending double play. Now there are runners on 1st and 3rd and things are getting interesting. Next, Ozzie made a diving stop on a ground ball meandering towards right field and was able to throw out Jackson Holliday for the 2nd out, but now the game was tied, and we moved towards extra innings.

When I think about Andruw Jones on the occasion of his formal induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame today, my favorite way to describe him was that “He makes the impossible look hard.” In the 10th inning, Danny Young made a hard situation seemingly impossible. His wild pitch on ball 4 moved ghost-runner Sam Huff to 3rd, and down to first went Dylan Beavers. Damn. Alonso was then intentionally walked to load the bases, as the winning run was already on 3rd. Some definitions now – Uneventful: a first baseman credited with 3 putouts in an inning. Eventful: Matt Olson catching a line drive and doubling a runner off first with no outs and the bases loaded in a tie game in the bottom of the 10th, then catching a fly ball in short right field.

The Braves scored the eventual winning run quickly in the 11th, when Austin Riley doubled in pinch-ghost-runner Jorge Mateo. Not much happened in the bottom of the inning except for Walt Weiss intentionally walking Taveras with 2 out to move the potential tying run to 3rd and the potential winning run to 2nd. The gamble was to pitch to catcher Huff, who was 4 – 32 on the season. Huff was playing only because the Orioles elected (reasonably) to pinch hit for Chadwick Tromp in the 9th. The Orioles apparently have so little regard for Huff that they elected to have Tromp catch the Sunday day game after the Saturday night game, or possibly they have so little value for Tromp that they don’t mind running him into the ground, or both. Weiss’s regard for Huff looks to be self-explanatory. As JonathanF mentioned in the recap of Saturday’s game, Huff is the grandson of NFL legend Sam Huff. The difference between the two turns out that at least the late Mr. Huff might have drawn a walk. The ABS zone on him would have been interesting for sure. A ground ball to 3rd and the Braves secured the series 2 games to 1, with a run differential of +1 over 30 innings.

Reynaldo Lopez went 5 2/3 innings, striking out 6 and allowing 5 hits and a walk. Smith ended up 3 for 5, and Drake Baldwin had 2 hits and walked 3 times. Tyler Kinley went the last 1 1/3 to be credited with the win.

The Braves are 63 – 42 and hold a 6-game lead over the Phillies pending the outcome of Philadelphia’s Sunday night game against the Yankees. On to the Mets on Monday at 7:10 Eastern, Martin Perez and Zac Thornton scheduled.