It may not have been the best exhibition of baseball this weekend, but it was what the Braves needed: wins.
Amidst all of the late-inning chaos that surrounded this just-completed Arizona series is the capper: the Atlanta Braves basically won these games by taking nearly all of the players recently stolen from Arizona and rubbing their noses in it.
Somewhere out there, I could imagine that even the ghost of Bronson Arroyo is snickering somewhere at this outcome. More on that in a bit.
The Braves didn’t completely bury the Diamondbacks this weekend, but they may have come close. Arizona entered this series with a 75-64 record – hopeful that they could do well against Atlanta while the Rockies and Dodgers were beating up one another in Denver.
At that time, they were 2 games out of the lead in the West and 2.5 games behind for a Wild Card berth.
Now they are 76-67, 2.5 games back in the West (and further behind the 2nd place Dodgers) and 5½ behind in the Wild Card race.
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On top of that, their bullpen is now actually worse off than that of the Braves. Over the past 7 days, the Braves’ relief corp has posted a 6.83 ERA.
Arizona’s? 6.86. Only the Cubs (!) and Rangers have posted higher ERAs in that period.
Atlanta still has to get through San Francisco despite having worked their relievers the 4th-most in baseball (not counting the Rays – they are a special case) in the past week.
Nearly 28 innings have been spread around quite a bit, but this average of almost 4 innings per game can’t be sustained… somebody has to step up and either go 7+ innings as a starter – or else just ‘take one for the team’.
Fortunately for Atlanta, they did run into a bullpen that was teetering worse than theirs.
But this wasn’t all about the Braves escaped Phoenix with 3 wins… it was also about how they did it…