Atlanta Braves: Gausman Spectacular in Season Debut

Kevin Gausman exceeded all expectations in his season debut as the Atlanta Braves took down the Miami Marlins 4-0.

After not getting a quality start or a pitcher going more than five innings in their first five games, the Atlanta Braves have now gotten back-to-back quality starts.

After Max Fried pitched six scoreless innings against the Chicago Cubs on Thursday, Kevin Gausman one-upped him by pitching seven scoreless innings against the Miami Marlins on Friday night.

Not only is it great to see our starters giving us quality innings, but it’s also been even better to see our bullpen less.

Here are our three takeaways from Friday night’s win:

– Gausman Spectacular: As I already mentioned, Gausman was spectacular in his 2019 season debut.

That is certainly not what I expected from him after how he looked in Spring Training.

You have to take everything against the rebuilding Marlins with a grain of salt, but Gausman shut them down.

The fastball was up to 96 MPH, and he really didn’t even need his offspeed pitchers, but those were biting as well.

Things especially didn’t look good after he walked the first two batters of the game, but those were the only free passes he allowed, along with 2 hits, while striking out seven.

If this is the Gausman we can expect, suddenly the Atlanta Braves rotation looks a lot more stable.

– Donaldson Struggling at Plate, but not in the Field: It’s been a very slow start for Josh Donaldson at the plate. It almost seems like he’s trying too hard to get that first home run.

I’m hoping once he does get that long ball he’ll settle in and just focus on barreling up some baseballs.

My main concern with Donaldson coming into the season was his defense. Johan Camargo was Gold Glove-caliber there last year, so I thought we would take a step back.

However, Donaldson has been great defensively and looks healthy at the hot corner.

The bat will come around, but it’s very encouraging to see him make some difficult plays at third base.

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– Confidence Building: Winning cures a lot of things. As Alan wrote Friday morning, we’ve seen the worst and best of this team.

There are stretches where our pitching — mainly the bullpen — is going to frustrate fans to death. But then are stretches like they are on now where it feels like we can do no wrong.

This finally looks like the team we saw a lot last year as they feel like they can win every game, and they are not going to give up.

I honestly think that opening series was just a perfect storm of badness. Now that they’ve had a chance to settle in, come home, and win a couple of games in a row, this team will start to settle in.

On Saturday the Marlins and Atlanta Braves will play again as rookie Kyle Wright takes on Sandy Alcantara. We’ll see if the Atlanta Braves can extend their win streak to five games.