WASHINGTON – The winless Braves didn’t blow a late-innings lead Tuesday, but they wasted their best pitching performance of the young season and found another wrenching way to lose.
Bryce Harper’s two-out, two-run double landed just beyond the outstretched glove of diving left fielder Jeff Francoeur in the eighth inning, lifting the Washington Nationals to a 2-1 win that sunk the Braves to 0-7 and spoiled a strong season debut from starter Jhoulys Chacin.
The Braves got a two-out RBI double from pinch Kelly Johnson in the ninth inning before rookie Mallex Smith struck out on an attempted check swing to end the game.
The Braves have lost the first two of a four-game series and fell to 0-12 at Nationals Park over two seasons. They are 0-7 for the first time since starting 0-10 in 1988 in a 106-loss season, and they lost Tuesday despite the first scoreless start by a Braves pitcher this season — Chacin allowed five hits and no walks with eight strikeouts in six crisp innings.
“Losing sucks, no matter how you lose,” Braves catcher Tyler Flowers said. ” It’s been a tough stretch. I feel like we’re playing good ball, we just can’t get that big hit or get that big out, or we come up with a little miscue or something that kind of snowballs an inning on us.
“We’re getting close (to winning). I mean, we’re all still very positive in here. I think we’re capable of running off as many wins as we have losses right now. I think there’s that caliber of talent in the room. Chacin’s just another welcome addition to help us get that rolling.”
It was a scoreless game when Braves reliever Jim Johnson gave up a one-out pinch-hit single by Stephen Drew in the eighth inning and walked Anthony Rendon with two out.
Left-hander Eric O’Flaherty was brought in to face Harper, who hit an opposite-field soft fly ball perhaps 20 feet inside the left-field line. Francoeur, who made his first start of the season, raced over and dove for it, but the ball landed inches in front of his glove and caromed off it.
Chacin threw 52 strikes in just 69 pitches, but manager Fredi Gonzalez replaced him with pinch-hitter Jace Peterson after Gordon Beckham’s two-out double in the seventh inning. Peterson struck out.
“I understand,” Chacin said of the manager’s decision. “It’s nothing-nothing (score) and you have a chance to score a run, the matchup’s righty-lefty, I was fine with it. I was hoping we’d get a base hit there or later in the game we win the game. That’s the main focus, trying to win games. So I was fine with it.”
The Braves mustered just three hits in six scoreless innings against lefty Gio Gonzalez. They had two runners on and none out in the second inning and failed to score, and leadoff singles in the fourth and fifth innings and threatened in neither.
They loaded the bases in the eighth with two walks and Adonis Garcia’s one-out bloop single against right-hander Blake Treinen, but Francoeur grounded into an inning-ending double play.
“Every time you pitch good and your team doesn’t win, it’s hard to take it,” Chacin said. “But I was trying to help the team win the game. I tried to do the best I could to help us win. It didn’t happen today, so we come back and try tomorrow.”
The Braves didn’t need a fifth starter until Tuesday, so they carried an extra reliever in the first six games until bringing up Chacin to plug into the rotation. Chacin didn’t pitch like their No. 5 Tuesday, he pitched like their best starter.
It was only one game, of course. But his was the first inspiring performance by a Braves starter this season.
Chacin, who last faced the Nationals in 2013, extended his scoreless-innings streak against them to 16, though he snapped a three-start winning streak against them with no decision. The Braves hope they’ve found a new weapon against the Nationals – Chacin is 3-1 with a 1.80 ERA in the past five of six starts against them.
He rarely topped 90 mph on the radar gun and keeping the Nationals off balance with a mix of sinkers, sliders, cut fastballs and changeups. Most of his fastballs were in the 86-90 mph range, but he’d throw a four-seam (straight) fastball occasionally at about 92 mph. His sliders were 79-83 mph, the cutters 85-86 mph, the change-ups in the low-80s.
“I’d much rather face a guy throwing 100 (mph) straight than a guy throwing 92 with some heavy sink,” Flowers said. “And he’s able to hump it up too, at times, with a little bit straighter ball that really gets on hitters because they’re expecting that 89-91 sink. All of a sudden he elevates a little bit at 92 with the four-seamer and it really gets on them.
“He really did a great job, we were able to throw off-speed early, obviously get ahead of most everybody, which is a huge part of the game to have success. And we were able to put a lot of guys away, too. We used the curveball a little bit more than in my experience with him in the spring; it was a good weapon for him.”
