LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Kris Medlen didn't have to think long for the last time he had a pitching line similar what he posted Monday against the Phillies.
“Never had an outing like that in my life,” said the Braves right-hander, who was charged with nine runs and 14 hits – yes, fourteen — in five innings, with no walks and four strikeouts in the Braves’ unusual 17-10 slugfest win at Champion Stadium.
Medlen has a 15-2 record and 2.81 ERA in 30 regular-season starts, including 9-0 with an 0.97 ERA in 12 starts last season after moving from the bullpen to the rotation at the end of July.
He allowed as many earned runs (nine) in five innings Monday as he gave up in 83-2/3 innings as a starter in the 2012 regular season.
As he noted, the hits and runs against him Monday “count” as much as the two singles he hit himself: Not at all. Spring-training games are glorified workouts, exhibitions in which a score is kept but results forgotten once Opening Day arrives, for all except some players competing for jobs.
That doesn’t make it any more pleasant to endure a shellacking the likes of which Medlen absorbed Monday. Neither did the fact that several hits were groundballs.
He threw fastballs in counts when he wouldn’t during the regular season, and some got hammered during a seven-hit, five-run second inning for the Phillies that followed a six-run, seven-hit first inning for the Braves.
The other four runs off Medlen were in the fifth inning, when Domonic Brown hit a two-run homer.
“It was a little new for me to be out there like that, two big innings,” said Medlen. “The zeroes I did put up felt great and I made my pitches when I needed to (in those three scoreless innings).”
He threw 84 pitches (62 strikes) after throwing fewer than 50 pitches in his last start when he blanked the Marlins on two hits over 4-2/3 innings before getting hit by a line drive in the triceps of his throwing arm, which was fine a day later.
“I just felt like when I located it, I jammed some guys and (hits) fell in,” he said. “I made some good pitches and some bad pitches. Just taking a positive from it, I went from throwing 49 pitches (Wednesday) to throwing 84 today. I’ve got two more starts left and I’m not even to 100 pitches yet, so it was good for me to be out there kind of fatiguing a little bit and staying out there and throwing more pitches. Something constructive you can look at from the outing.”
Manager Fredi Gonzalez said, “Med’s fine. He might be trying to pitch a little backward to these guys (than he would during the season), who knows? But at least he got his pitch count up. That’s a good thing. I don’t think he went out there and did that on purpose, but that’s a good thing.”
Medlen refused to make excuses, but conceded he might have tired in the fifth inning.
“You still need to battle through that,” he said. “You’re going to fatigued during the year, too. The seventh, eighth, whatever inning when you get up to 90-100 pitches. I just think you need to use your legs more and use your conditioning that you’ve had, instead of just throwing all upper body, which I’m probably relying on. I’m going to keep saying I felt good, but maybe I was getting tired.
“In the long run, I felt like I made some pitches and didn’t make some. When I didn’t, I got hit hard a couple of times.”
When he did want to throw an off-speed pitch, Medlen said his curveball was ineffective again Monday.
“My curveball has been a terrible pitch for me this spring, so I’ve been working on (it),” he said. “Even today, normally I’d probably go with another pitch, but when I tried to throw (the curveball) it was just dog poop. It’s a rhythm thing for me and kind of balancing all three pitches at once.”
Unusual game: Justin Upton had two homers and six RBIs for the Braves and Freddie Freeman added a two-run homer on a flyball that bounced off the glove of Phillies left fielder Darin Ruf and over the fence (it was ruled a hit rather than an error).
Nine Braves had hits including six with multiple hits; the only player in Atlanta’s lineup to go hitless was Dan Uggla (0-for-4, strikeouts, batting .182).
The Braves also had their first miscommunication in the outfield when a fly ball landed between right fielder Jason Heyward and center fielder B.J. Upton with runners at second and third in the second inning. Heyward was set to catch it when Upton raced over and called him off at the last second.
Heyward is the only returner in a Braves outfield with the Upton brothers, including Justin in left.
“I’m surprised it’s taken this long, actually,” Gonzalez said of the misplay. “You’ve got three guys in the outfield who haven’t really played with each other, and you’ve got two guys who’ve got above-average arms and they’re both trying to get in position to throw the guy out. And it just came up miscommunication. I’m glad it happened in spring training….
“The first couple of innings it was a weird game. We saw a lot of stuff. They give up six and we give up five, and you see that home run ball off the glove, and we miscommunicated on a fly ball. Then we settled down and kept swinging the bats and played some good defense after that.
