The Braves had another clunker Friday night, losing the series opener to the Red Sox 5-1. The offense had feeble production only 24 hours after scoring nine runs against the Phillies — and ace Zack Wheeler — on the road.
It continued the disturbing trend of inconsistency. The Braves (26-30) have mustered one or no runs 11 times this season. Seemingly every time there’s an outburst, a whimper is around the corner.
Any optimism is rooted in the Braves hitters’ track records, many of which are sublime, and the team routinely hitting the ball with ferocity. They’re 9-14 in one-run games. They’ve lost 12 games in which they held a lead. They’ve had four walk-off losses.
First baseman Matt Olson cited several of those factors when sharing he thinks the team is “right on the edge” of playing to its capabilities following Friday’s game.
“We look around the clubhouse and see the team we have,” Olson said. “We have a lot of guys who have done it before. They’re not necessarily doing it to the level they’ve done it in the past, I think everybody is aware personally if they’re falling short of what they think they can do. But we have a hell of a team. You have to have that confidence every day. We’ve played a lot of tight games here lately and not come through on a good bit of them, and we don’t feel like we’re clicking at all.
“I feel like you can spin it two different ways of saying we can’t win the tight game, or you can look at it and say we’re not playing really great baseball for us, (but) we’re still in a lot of ballgames. You play this long of a season, you take the positive route. You take the silver lining and you keep the confidence up. We’ve made some crazy runs before. That is absolutely possible with this team.”
Outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. has been superb since returning, which helps. As does ace Spencer Strider getting back on the mound; he’ll presumably get only better with more innings. But the Braves are trying to climb out of a hole they dug with an 0-7 start. They’re trying to find enough consistency to get them comfortably above .500; then the postseason can become a more realistic conversion.
June often has been a launching point for the Braves. Their bats will get hot as the weather does the same. Another phenomenal June would go a long way toward rejuvenating what’s been a middling club since last May.
“We have guys who’ve been very successful,” manager Brian Snitker said. “They’re All-Stars. It just shows you how tough this game is and how hard it is to play this game. Sometimes they make it look easy, but it’s not. It’s a hard game to play, mentally, physically. We have guys in the lineup who’ve had success, and they’ve done it. The only thing you can do is just keep grinding and working at it and eventually, it’s going to come. We’re going to get it going at some point.”
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