MILWAUKEE – Try as he might, journeyman starter Roberto Hernandez just did not have enough to compete with the Milwaukee Brewers on Thursday, and the Braves bullpen had its first bad day in a while.
The Brewers hit three homers and scored five runs against Hernandez in the first four innings, then kept on scoring in a 11-3 rout at Miller Park. They led 6-0 after five innings and scored at least one run in all eight of their innings.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that,” Braves left fielder Jeff Francoeur said of a team scoring every inning, the first time the Brewers did it and the eighth time any team has in a nine-inning game in baseball’s expansion era.
“I don’t think I’ve been a part of that. It was tough. For them it was great — you want to keep taking on runs and they were able to do it every inning against us,” Francoeur said. “When (that happens), you’re not going to win.”
After winning the first two games of the four-game series, the Braves had a four-game winning streak snapped Wednesday and got blown out Thursday, with a big early-innings home run off the bat of slugger Chris Carter fueling the Brewers in both games.
The Braves are 4-3 on a 10-game trip that finishes with a series at Washington starting Friday.
Carter crushed a three-run homer off Joel De La Cruz in the third inning of Wednesday’s 4-3 Brewers win, then hit a two-run homer in the first inning Thursday. Hernandez (1-1) made the same mistake De La Cruz did by hanging a slider against the extremely strong Carter, who has 27 home runs including a majors-leading 20 at home.
“Honestly it wasn’t even that bad a mistake,” Braves catcher Anthony Recker said. “It was a fairly decently located pitch down and away. He’s got enough power to get out on that front foot and flip it out, which is amazing. He just did a really good job of hitting that pitch. I don’t think we pitched him in enough early.”
The Braves saw their 14-inning bullpen scoreless streak snapped when Brandon Cunniff gave up a run on two hits and a walk in the fifth inning, then gave up three more runs in the sixth. Those last three runs against Cunniff scored when he left the game with bases loaded — on one hit, two walks — and Manny Pina greeted Braves rookie Madison Younginer by hitting a three-run double to push the lead to 9-2.
“Got behind too much too early,” said interim manager Brian Snitker, whose Braves won 10 of 14 games before losing the past two. “Just had a hard time stopping the bleeding there for a while, really worked to get the outs.”
Milwaukee had led 6-0 before the Braves scored two runs in the sixth including a leadoff homer by Erick Aybar. Aybar was one of the few bright spots for the Braves as the recently resurgent veteran shortstop collected three hits including a first-inning double.
“Offensively, we come roaring back that one inning and I thought, well, here we go, here we come again,” Snitker said. “That big hit that Madison gave up with bases loaded, it’s kind of tough to come back from that.”
Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman also had a sacrifice fly and reached base three times on two walks and a double off the left-field wall, after going 3-for-3 with two homers and a walk Wednesday.
Hernandez gave up seven hits and five runs in four innings with two strikeouts. A 35-year-old right-hander waited 14 months from his last start with the Astros in June 2015 before he pitched again in the majors last week when the Braves called him up from Triple-A to fill a gap in their injury- and trade-thinned rotation.
He wasn’t bad in his start against the Cardinals — five innings, six hits, three runs in a win — but was not sharp at all against the Brewers. With Julio Teheran expected back from the disabled list by late next week, Hernandez might soon be again on the outside looking in.
Teheran, on the DL with a lat strain, felt good in a bullpen side session Thursday and is expected to make one rehab start.
“That’ll really be kind of a big shot in the arm, and also Viz,” Snitker said, referring to reliever Aroydys Vizcaino, nearing his return from a DL stint for a strained oblique. “If we can get him back in the middle of the bullpen, that’ll just make us even deeper yet. Looking ahead, it’s going to get better. We’ve got guys coming. I think we’re doing a pretty good job of hanging in there right now with all the injuries and stretching the organization as thin as we have. We’re doing OK.”
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