The Braves are struggling. The fans know it. The coaches know it. And the players know it.
And their downward spiral that saw them drop eight of their last 10 games continued Saturday with a 9-6 loss to the Orioles in extra innings. The Braves’ offense posted a 10-hit performance, but their bullpen — which covered all 10 innings — gave out in the end.
“We’re struggling,” a visibly frustrated Brian Snitker said at the postgame podium. “It’s frustrating to me. It’s (frustrating) for the coaches, for the players, everybody — nobody likes where we’re at right now.”
The loss dropped the Braves to 39-49 on the season and 12.5 games behind the NL East. More importantly to the club, it is 8.5 games out of the National League’s final Wild Card spot with 74 contests left to play.
A few positives came from the loss. Matt Olson reached base five times, Austin Riley hit a home run, and Drake Baldwin recorded two hits.
But the season is looking bleak for a club that made seven consecutive postseasons entering the year.
“What you do is wake up tomorrow and you come out,” Snitker said. “I say that all the time, people are probably tired of listening to it. But the reality of it is, the next thing we have to do is a game in front of us. It’s the one thing we can control.”
The Braves had a chance to break the game open in the sixth inning when they loaded the bases against former Brave Scott Blewett with nobody out and the middle of its order at the plate.
However, the team only scored one to take a 6-5 lead on a Jurickson Profar ground out. The other two outs came on a strikeout from Riley — only one pitch landed outside of the strike zone, and it ended as a called strike — and a ground out from Baldwin, who swung at a pitch over the plate on a 3-1 count.
The Orioles took advantage of the Braves squandering their opportunity and tied the game with a double and single off of Austin Cox in the top of the next inning.
“That’s just a chance right there that we can blow the game open,” Snitker said. “We couldn’t do that. That kind of grates at you a little bit. I know it happens, it’s part of baseball, but man, you’d like to cash in on an inning like that.”
The Braves likely win the game if one of their top starters — Chris Sale, Spencer Schwellenbach, Spencer Strider, Grant Holmes or even AJ Smith-Shawver — is on the mound. But injuries to three of the five members in that starting rotation left the club with a big hole to fill.
The team opted to employ a bullpen game, which Snitker said he “does not see happening again,” with reliever Aaron Bummer making the first start of his nine-year MLB career. And the plan worked perfectly for the first couple of innings, as Bummer struck out five of the first seven batters he faced, but a pair of home runs knocked him out of the game in the third inning.
The two long balls broke Bummer’s streak of 36.2 innings without surrendering a home run and gave the Orioles a 3-2 lead.
“The one thing that I kind of pride myself on is limiting the long ball,” Bummer said. “It’s something I’ve done good, kind of throughout my entire career. And to get beat by the long ball in that spot, that’s really tough — especially after (Olson’s) home run — to take the lead. In reality, it just ends your outing on a sour note.”
Olson tied the game back up with a home run in the bottom of the third inning — he’s now hitting .429 over his last seven games and .333 across his last 30 — and the two offenses exchanged blows from there.
But the Braves eventually ran out of pitching in the 10th inning.
Rafael Montero took the mound for the frame as the Braves’ last available reliever that did not pitch in Friday night’s series opener. The team wanted to stay away from high-leverage arms Dylan Lee and Pierce Johnson, who threw 25 and 16 pitches the night before.
The Orioles scored three runs off of Montero in the top of the 10th, and three uncompetitive at-bats from the bottom of the Braves’ order sealed their loss.
“It’s one of those things where in a game like that, you hope you pull it out in the end,” Bummer said of bullpen games. “And unfortunately, we didn’t. But the beautiful thing about the game is we get a strap up again tomorrow.”
Luckily for the Braves, they can quickly turn the page with a 11:35 a.m. first pitch against the Orioles Sunday. Grant Holmes will take the mound, as the club aims to avoid a series sweep.
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