The Braves won 20 of their last 35 games before the All-Star break to post a competitive 42-45 record at the break that surprised most observers around baseball, especially considering the team played without its best player, Freddie Freeman, for seven weeks while he recovered from a fractured wrist.
Now comes the real test: The Braves’ schedule coming out of the break is far more difficult than the weeks before the break, when just 12 of their final 36 games were against teams that had winning records.
Seventeen of their first 32 games after the break are against teams with winning record including seven against the team with the best record in the National League, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and six against the team with the NL’s second-best record, the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The Braves started a three-game series Friday against the Diamondbacks, whose 53-36 record at the break would make them the leader in four of six MLB divisions. Then the World Series champion Cubs come to town before the Braves leave on an 11-game road trip beginning Thursday that starts with four games against the Dodgers, who have baseball’s best home record, and three games at Arizona, which has the second-best home record.
“This is going to be a true test, the next couple of weeks,” Freeman said. “We feel good, obviously we wish we would have had a better ending to the first half, we had a couple (of losses at Washington) that got away. I think we’re 9 ½ behind the Nationals, but these next two weeks is a big stretch. We’re going to know real quick if we’re the real deal. We’ve got touch matchups against the Diamondbacks, Cubs, Dodgers, back to the Diamondbacks. Hopefully we play some good baseball and we can stay right in this thing.”
Of the Braves’ 15 games against sub-.500 teams in the 32-game stretch coming out of the break, six are against the Cubs and the Cardinals, who were each 43-45 at the break, a half-game better than the Braves.
The Braves closed the first half by getting thumped in two games against the powerful Astros at home and splitting a four-game series at Washington.
“I look at the last series, woulda coulda and all that stuff, but we could have taken that (Nationals) series again from them and that’s a pretty good team,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said Friday. “But we are getting into the teeth of this thing for the next 2 ½ weeks. It’s going to be pretty rough. We just take it a day at a time, try to win today, that’s the big focus right now.”
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