Ian Anderson’s perfect postseason ERA, the one with 0.00 impurities, remains intact. His Braves scored in bunches. They are up 2-0 in the National League Championship Series against the favored Los Angeles Dodgers, hanging on by fingernails and toenails to beat the Dodgers 8-7 on Tuesday.
Do the details – Anderson’s struggle to command the strike zone, his shortest October outing yet, only four innings before Brian Snitker pulled his plug – really matter at this point? Not when all the real drama and the ways the Braves tried to squander a seven-run lead happened long after he clocked out.
That’s three career postseason outings by the 22-year-old who began this season outsourced to Gwinnett, 15-2/3 innings all told of scorelessness on his watch. On Tuesday, he became just one of two pitchers in baseball history to open their postseason career with three consecutive scoreless starts of at least four innings. He joined Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, circa 1905.
OK, it wasn’t a pretty four innings Tuesday, except when looking at the bottom line.
“It was a battle out there, that’s for sure,” he said. "I think I made a bunch of quality pitches and they put together some phenomenal at-bats.
“Keeping zeroes up on the scoreboard is the biggest thing at the end of the day.”
By the close of the fourth inning, Anderson had already thrown 85 stressful pitches. He yielded only one hit, but the five walks that accompanied five strikeouts contributed to the soaring pitch count.
When he came back to the dugout at the top of the fifth, Snitker already had planned to pull him. And after the Braves batted around then – the top of the fifth lasted 33 minutes – the manager was more certain of his decision.
“If you have four innings and over 80 pitches, things aren’t going real smooth for you,” Snitker said. “You’re really having to work. You combine that with the mental-type thing of this situation. There was no easy sledding for him. In retrospect, after that long inning I’d have probably taken him out anyway. We hit so long that inning, we would have bagged him anyway.”
Credit: Curtis Compton / curtis.compton@ajc.com
Credit: Curtis Compton / curtis.compton@ajc.com
Anderson had to deal with plenty of Los Angeles traffic this night. From the beginning, his pitch count was going all bull market as he worked his way through two walks in the first inning. With two on and two out, Anderson was helped out by a defensive collaboration between third baseman Austin Riley – a crouching snag of a sizzling Will Smith grounder – and first baseman Freddie Freeman – laying out to pull in Riley’s wide throw while keeping the side of his right foot somehow rooted on the bag. That got Anderson out of the first, but not before he had thrown 29 pitches.
“That was huge,” Anderson said. “Riley made a fantastic play. And Freddie on the other end showing why he’s got that Gold Glove, that was pretty fantastic. It definitely settled me down that we were able to get out of that jam. That went a long way toward helping me get through the innings that I did.”
The stress mounted in the third, when another pair of walks and a Justin Turner single loaded the bases with two outs. Up again came Smith, the Dodgers' OPS leader (.980) this postseason. Crisis averted when Smith grounded more gently to Riley this time.
The fourth inning was a relative breeze, Anderson giving up his fifth walk just before ending the inning with his fifth strikeout. But something told Snitker that his 22-year-old postseason phenom was done.
Having set a certain impossible standard with his first two outings, Anderson could be excused if he was a little down on Tuesday’s showing.
On the contrary.
When he blanked Cincinnati and Miami, it was kind of cute because, well, it was Cincinnati and Miami.
But these are the Dodgers, baseball’s highest scoring bunch, a collection of blue bombers. But ultimately, they, too, joined the empty set that is Anderson’s postseason rap sheet.
“This one was kind of one you can almost take more pride in,” he said. “That’s a good lineup and really having to battle through that and pulling out a huge team win all around is one I’ll probably look back on, however this ends up going. I think I’ll point at this one and say this one was the one I was most proud of up to this point.”
The game would get downright scary as the Dodgers roared back from the seven-run deficit, and had the tying run at third before Braves closer Mark Melancon got the last out.
The bullpen buckled more than at any point this year.
But the young starter kept throwing zeroes.
“Man, he’s got ice in his veins,” Melancon said of Anderson.
And in closing, he added, “This is a short bit of what we’re going to see from him in a long time from now. We’re going to keep looking back at these moments and continually see that from here on out. I’m excited for him.”
