After failing to take advantage of golden opportunities in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings, the Braves finally broke through in the eighth Friday night against the Nationals, and broke through in a big way.
Nick Markakis had a tie-breaking single with one out and Kurt Suzuki came through again in the clutch with a two-run, two-out homer off left-handed reliever Enny Romer that secured a 7-4 Braves win in a series opener at SunTrust Park.
“You’ve got your division rival and the team that’s leading the division coming to town for a big series, it’s a pretty cool moment,” Suzuki said. “But I think we should really realize, Kakes (Markakis) has that professional at-bat, lefty on lefty against a guy throwing 98 (mph), I mean that set everything up. He had a great at-bat. I got to see a lot of pitchers from (on-deck circle), he put us on top and it was nice to get that little extra insurance, for sure.”
Matt Kemp and Dansby Swanson each had a home run and reached base four times apiece for the Braves, and Brandon Phillips reached base three times and had two stolen bases including a crucial steal in the ninth to put himself in scoring position for Markakis’s go-ahead single.
“I just try to take advantage of the situations,” said Phillips, 35, who has seven stolen bases in eight attempts over 35 games, despite being slowed several weeks a strained groin. “He gave me the opportunity to steal a base, my groin is feeling a little bit better, and I just said, hey, I’m going to take a gamble here and try to get in scoring position.
“You know that Nick is the guy that you want to see (hitting with runners) in scoring position and he came through.”
The Braves won for sixth time in past eight games and evened their record at 1-1 since losing star Freddie Freeman to a fractured wrist. It’s their first win in four games against the Nationals at SunTrust Park and gave the Nationals have a three-game losing streak after dropping two at Pittsburgh Wednesday and Thursday.
Washington (25-16) still leads the National League East by seven games over the second-place Braves (17-22).
“Baseball’s crazy,” Phillips said. “We could have won the game earlier, but we stayed within ourselves, we believe in ourselves. We lost Freddie, so everybody’s got to pick up their game a little bit more than what we’ve been doing. It’s not pressure, we’ve just got to focus a little bit more and do the small things, just like today.”
After seven innings the score was 4-4 and the Braves had gone 2-for-10 with runners in scoring position and stranded 11 runners, including leaving multiple runners in scoring position in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings.
Braves relievers were terrific — 3 2/3 perfect innings from Jason Motte, Jose Ramirez, Arodys Vizcaino and Jim Johnson — and Swanson had a two-run homer, walk and double in his first three plate appearances to lift his average above the notorious Mendoza Line to .201. He’s made a steady climb since bottoming out at .125 on April 21 after the 15th game.
“It seems there’s a lot of togetherness going on right now,” Swanson said. “I think we’re finally seeing what we were thinking was supposed to happen. I’m really, really proud of everybody because it was a total team effort. When Freddie goes down that’s a huge gap to fill but we’ve got a lot of faith in everyone else so if we just stay true to ourselves and play together that we’ve got a good chance to win, still. It was a beautiful thing to see tonight.”
Braves knuckleballer R.A. Dickey was hurt by shaky defense in a couple of innings but made big pitches to get out of some major jams. He was charged with eight hits, four runs (two earned) and three walks with four strikeouts in 5 1/3 innings, and if not for a questionable scorekeeper’s decision all but one of the runs could have been unearned.
Gio Gonzalez brought a 2.47 ERA but hadn’t faced the Braves in 2017, and they’ve given him more trouble than any other NL team most of his career. The lefty allowed a season-high nine hits and four runs with three walks and five strikeouts in 5 2/3 innings, getting no decision to remain winless in six starts against Atlanta since the beginning of 2016.
After Swanson homered in the second inning for a 2-0 lead, the Nationals got three runs in the third on two hits, a walk and a two-out error by fill-in first baseman Jace Peterson. Bryce Harper’s sharp grounder go past him to right-field foul territory, where it caromed off a wall that juts out toward the field. Two runs scored on the play for a 3-2 lead.
The first run in the inning scored after Michael Taylor doubled and Trea Turner hit a two-out grounder that Swanson tried to bare-hand. The ball didn’t touch his hand and went into the outfield, deep enough for Taylor to hesitate at third base and then dash home. The scorekeeper ruled no error and gave Turner an RBI.
After Kemp’s game-tying solo homer in the third inning – his seventh of the season — Murphy’s leadoff homer in the fourth put the Nationals back in front, 4-3. It was the 10th homer off Dickey in eight starts and eighth in five home starts.
Dickey escaped jams later in the fourth inning and again in the fifth, inducing an inning-ending grounder from Turner with two in scoring position in the fourth and getting Matt Wieters to pop out with bases loaded to end the fifth.
