Atlanta Braves fall to Phillies despite Freeman’s great performance

The Atlanta Braves continue to struggle as they fall to the Phillies 5-1 on Friday evening. 

It was yet another frustrating evening for Atlanta Braves fans as the team fell to Philadelphia and dropped in the NL East standings.

Getting over the .500 mark has proven to be incredibly difficult for the Braves and it just seems like the bad luck keeps coming.

Untimely miscues and lackluster starting pitching doomed Atlanta on Friday as Max Fried allowed four runs on six hits, walking four batters, and striking out six.

At the same time, the Braves offense was unable to get the “big hit” against Philly starter Zack Wheeler, who scattered 7 hits and struck out 8 over 7 innings as Atlanta left 10 runners on base.

Then there was the occasional — and uncharacteristic — sketchy defense.

With the score already 3-1 in the favor of the home team, Bryce Harper hit a leadoff single in the bottom of the fifth and proceeded to steal second and advance to third on a groundout.

One of the first miscues occurred when Max Fried threw over to first base and it looked like he had picked off Rhys Hoskins at first base. Unfortunately, the ball was mishandled during the rundown and Harper took off for home.

Ozzie Albies‘ throw was late and this allowed both runners to advance safely on a double steal.

The starting rotation and defense have been great as of late but today was not one of those days.

Despite the loss, Freddie Freeman has continued to stay scorching hot at the plate. He reached base three times and drove in Atlanta’s lone run.

Freeman is batting .435 (40-for-92) over the last 25 games and he has not been missing the ball.  Literally.

He has now gone 33 plate appearances without swinging and missing. That is absolutely unreal. It shows just how good of a hitter Freeman is when he’s got everything figured out.

While this streak is much appreciated, we need more people to start stepping up and helping him out.

These next few days will likely determine what the Atlanta Braves decide to do at the trade deadline.

I don’t mean to be a pessimist but things don’t look promising for the ball club. Things just have not been going our way.

At some point, one of these NL East teams will start to pull away from the pack and you hope the Braves are on the right side of that.

Hopefully, they can shake this one off and win this series to gain some ground in the division and get back to a winning record.