Atlanta Braves continue to stymie the Nationals: 3 Friday night takeaways

The Atlanta Braves are still doing whatever it takes to beat the Washington Nationals – even though it was not pretty at times on Friday night.

The final score read like this:  Atlanta Braves 4, Washington Nationals 3.  The important parts of this was that another date was torn off the calendar and the Nationals got to record another Curly ‘L’ in the book.

This is a Braves team truly making a statement:  they are telling all opponents ‘we do not fear you – we will simply beat you.’  That is holding true as they’ve now beaten their closest foe in 2 straight of this 4-game set, and taken 16 of their last 18 overall.  Remarkable.

This has certainly been a series circled on the Nats’ calendar for quite a while, yet now the best they can do is to split the games, and thus leave Atlanta no closer than when they arrived.

That said, Atlanta now has the very real opportunity to crush Washington this weekend and put to rest any hype about having a real divisional race over the final 3 weeks of the season.

The Nationals have been playing very well… quite well since May 24th, as we understand from their P-R department.  But the Braves have been better and they did it last night despite not hitting on all cylinders at times.

That leads us to the day’s takeaways.

3. ‘With 1 Hand tied behind my back’

Atlanta is still playing very much short-handed… this despite the expanded rosters.  Nick Markakis is still out.  Ender Inciarte is still on the mend.

Consider that the starting outfield was Adam Duvall, Ronald Acuna Jr. and Austin Riley (the corner guys in there to counter the lefty starter Patrick Corbin).  Arguably, Tyler Flowers is their 3rd best catcher right now.

Despite all of this, the Braves cobbled together 15 base-runners on 7 hits, 7 walks and a hit batsman (Flowers, of course).

How did this happen?

In 2 words:  Spoiling pitches.

Corbin threw 107 pitches through 5 innings.  He only had given up 1 earned run to that point, but he was out of the game.  Atlanta worked him to death for walks, hit the ball hard (for 2 Washington errors and an Ozzie Albies homer), and even made Corbin work for his 9 strikeouts.

Once into the Washington bullpen… it was just a matter of time, and Josh Donaldson took advantage.

So despite the improvised lineup, despite the injuries… these Atlanta Braves are continuing to dominate.  Best Braves bench depth in ages.