The Braves have had the best bullpen in baseball this season and the best closer for the past couple of seasons, but they got scorched multiple times in the late innings Friday night by the Mets before a stunned crowd at Turner Field.
David Wright hit a tying solo homer off closer Craig Kimbrel in the ninth inning, and the Mets scored two runs in the 10th to pull out a 7-5 win in a series opener that turned into a rollercoaster ride in the late innings.
The Braves’ best two relievers each got a blown save on a home run, with left-hander Eric O’Flaherty giving up a leadoff homer to Marlon Byrd in the eighth inning to erase a 4-3 lead, and Kimbrel coughing up the 5-4 lead on Wright’s one-out homer in the ninth.
“We’ve been good so far this year, until tonight,” Kimbrel said of the bullpen, which entered with a majors-leading 1.94 ERA. “Our offense went out there and did what they had to do. They scored when we needed to score, and we just weren’t able to hold it down. We let this one slip away. Our bullpen just couldn’t hold it down tonight.”
It was the 11th loss in 16 games for the Braves since their 12-1 start, and the late meltdown overshadowed the Braves’ comeback from an early 3-0 deficit and Evan Gattis’ go-ahead homer in the eighth inning.
“Usually you give our guys the lead, they’re going to shut it down,” manager Fredi Gonzalez said, “and they end up getting four runs out of our bullpen from the eighth inning on. That doesn’t usually happen to our guys. We had some opportunities (in the ninth). We had the right guy with the right situation, we just didn’t convert.”
The Braves had a chance to win in the ninth after a leadoff double from Ramiro Pena, but they stranded runners on the corners with Justin Upton grounded out to end the inning. Pena had advanced to third on a Reed Johnson sacrifice, but Jordan Schafer’s fly-out to center wasn’t deep enough for the Braves to send Pena.
After Andrelton Simmons drew a walk, Upton grounded out to third to force extra innings.
Gattis homered in the eighth to give the Braves a 5-4 lead, but Wright came back with a tying solo blast on a 97-mph fastball from Kimbrel. The closer made a mistake up in the strike zone on a 2-2 count with one out, and the result was his second blown save in his past three appearances.
“Against him, it’s almost close your eyes and swing hard and hope you hit it,” Wright said. “He’s as dominant as anybody in the game. So, really, you’ve just got to hope that he even makes a minor mistake, or really you don’t have much of a chance. So on that one it was kind of more luck than anything.”
Kimbrel said: “He’s definitely a guy you can’t make a mistake to, especially up in the zone with a fastball. On a night like tonight, as well. He hit that good. You can’t make mistakes to him, and I did. And that was the difference in the ballgame…. That’s a mistake that could’ve been avoided, but I didn’t do it, and I paid for it.”
Braves reliever Jordan Walden got the first two outs in the 10th before things went sideways again for the Braves. First, Walden walked Jordany Valdespin on three consecutive balls after getting ahead in the count, 1-2.
Valdespin stole second base on Walden’s first pitch to reliever Bobby Parnell, who was then replaced by pinch-hitter Mike Baxter with the count 0-1. Baxter swung and missed the next pitch before Walden threw him two balls and hit him with a 2-2 pitch.
Walden got ahead in the count 0-2 yet again on Ruben Tejada, but Tejada singled on the next pitch to drive in the go-ahead run.
“It’s frustrating,” Walden said. “I get him 0-2 and I hang a slider to him. Bad pitch…. I don’t know, I couldn’t put them away.”
That was all for Walden, who was replaced by Luis Avilan. The next batter, Daniel Murphy, followed with another RBI single for a 7-5 lead, and again it came on an 0-2 pitch.
“It was a bunch of guys there in the last inning that went 0-2, 1-2,” Gonzalez said, “and we just couldn’t make the pitch.”
Braves starter Mike Minor gave up three runs on two home runs in the first two innings, then retired the last 18 batters he faced after Lucas Duda’s leadoff homer in the second. He threw 90 pitches in seven innings and was replaced in the seventh by pinch-hitter Tyler Pastornicky, who laid down a sacrifice bunt after Pena’s leadoff single.
After Pena advanced on a wild pitch and Jordan Schafer drew his career-high fourth walk of the game, Pena scored the go-ahead run when Simmons hit a grounder and hustled to beat the relay throw to first, avoiding a double play.
Even after O’Flaherty gave up the lead, a crowd of 30,871 figured the Braves had this one when Gattis homered to regain the lead and Kimbrel entered the fray in the ninth with the familiar “Welcome to Jungle” cranked on the stadium speakers as faux flames flickered on the LED video boards.
And then the unthinkable happened. Again. He gave up a two-run lead in the ninth at Colorado on April 24, when Justin Upton misplayed a fly ball to contribute to the unraveling. But this time there wasn’t any other Brave involved, just Kimbrel vs. Wright.
Kimbrel’s two blown saves in 11 opportunities are half his total from 2012, when he converted 51 of 55.
Gattis put the Braves ahead with a line-drive home run to center with one out in the eighth. After striking out in each of his first three plate appearances Friday, he greeted reliever Brandon Lyon by blistering his first pitch for the rookie’s seventh home run and 17th RBI, the majors’ best among rookies in both categories.
Gattis looked particularly perturbed after his third strikeout, and showed more emotion than usual on his home-run trot as he rounded first base and pumped his fist.
The Braves trailed 3-1 before loading the the bases with one out in the fifth, after starting the inning with consecutive singles by B.J. Upton and Pena. Pena was filling in for Juan Francisco, who left the game with a mild ankle sprain in the third inning and was listed as day-to-day.
Upton also led off the third inning with a double and had his first multi-hit game since April 18. He was 4-for-43 with 18 strikeouts in 12 games since, dropping his average to a league-worst .134.
Upton was thrown out at third base on Minor’s bunt, but the Braves loaded the bases when Jordan Schafer walked, one of his career-high four walks in the game.
Simmons then poked a one-out, opposite-field single to right to drive in a run, and Justin Upton’s sacrifice fly brought in the tying run. He flied out to the right-field warning track, into the teeth of a strong wind.
That wind didn’t do the Braves any favors in the first inning, either. Tejada started the game with a fly ball near the right-field foul line, a ball that got caught up by the wind and fell in for a double on an apparent miscommunication between right fielder Schafer and two infielders.
The play proved costly when John Buck hit a two-out, two-run homer, his 10th.
After giving up just one homer in his first four starts, Minor has allowed two in each of his past two starts. But unlike at Detroit on Sunday, when the left-hander was tagged for six runs in 6-2/3 innings, this time Minor went into shutdown mode after the second homer.
The Braves offense finally re-awakened, after totaling seven hits and one run in a 20-inning stretch over two losses to Washington and the first two innings Friday.
B.J. Upton’s opposite-field double to start the third inning landed at the base of the right-field wall, snapping an 0-for-14 skid for the center fielder. He scored when Francisco singled up the middle, after falling behind in the count 0-2 and fouling off three consecutive two-strike pitches.
Francisco, who advanced on a sacrifice bunt, had a big lead off second base and turned his right ankle when he planted his foot trying to get back as Marcum turned and threw to second base.
