Rookie Lucas Sims got himself into one too many tight spots Monday night and the Phillies continued a startling season-long domination of the Braves, who are frustrated by it and can’t explain what’s happened against a team no one else finds formidable.
The Phillies broke open a tie game with two runs in the sixth inning of a 6-1 series-opening win at Citizens Bank Park, where they are 8-0 against the Braves this season and 20-35 against everyone else.
Their 2-12 overall record against the Phillies is currently the Braves’ lowest winning percentage against them in Atlanta franchise history, worse than a 2-10 mark in 1977.
“It’s been frustrating,” Braves center fielder Ender Inciarte said. “We’ve been playing some great baseball against some teams and very bad against some other teams. We haven’t been consistent at all and the Phillies, every time they see us, they’ve just been playing great. So it’s been very frustrating to come here not being able to perform the way we did before.”
Consider: The Braves have played seven games against the Dodgers, who have baseball’s best record, and 14 games against the Phillies, who have baseball’s worst record. They have three wins against the Dodgers and two against the Phillies.
The Braves have played four games at Dodger Stadium and eight games at Citizens Bank Park. They have two wins at Los Angeles and none at Philly.
Braves manager Brian Snitker was asked what message he might have for his team about facing the Phillies.
“I don’t know, if I had that message I would have probably said it to them two or three months ago,” he said. “It’s just one of them things. It’s just one of them things and we’ve got to come out and keep grinding, hopefully score a bunch of runs and give a pitcher a lead. I don’t have the answer for it.”
After losing their first five games against the Phillies this season, the Braves won two in a series split at SunTrust and have dropped the past seven.
On this night Phillies starter Aaron Nola (10-9) allowed just five hits, one run and no walks in seven innings, improving to 5-1 with a 1.96 ERA in seven career starts against the Braves.
Sims (2-3) had a career-high seven strikeouts in 6-1/3 innings, albeit with a career-high eight hits and four runs allowed in his sixth major league start and first at Philadelphia. He was pulled after facing three batters in the seventh, giving up a Cameron Rupp leadoff homer and a one-out walk to Cesar Hernandez, the last batter he faced and only walk he issued.
“It’s frustrating because I felt really good,” said Sims, who pitched into the seventh inning for the first time in the majors and threw more curveballs and sliders than he had in any previous start. “The sixth kind of got away. We battled back to even it back up (in the top of the inning), then to go out there and give it up, it’s frustrating.”
Nola faced the minimum 12 batters in the first four innings, with Brandon Phillips’ double-play grounder erasing Inciarte after a leadoff single in the first inning and Phillips thrown out trying to steal second for the last out in the fourth.
Still, Phillips was one of the few bright spots for the Braves, with two hits including an RBI single to leave him one shy of 2,000 career hits. He would be the 12th active player to reach that standard and the second Brave to do it this season, joining Nick Markakis.
Phillips’ two-out, game-tying single in the sixth scored Dansby Swanson, whose leadoff double was the Braves’ only extra-base hit.
Sims retired the first six batters before Pedro Florimon’s leadoff triple to the right-center gap in the third inning. One out later, he scored on pitcher Nola’s bounced single up the middle on a 2-2 fastball Sims left over the plate, after he’d gotten ahead in the count 1-2 and Nola took a slider for a ball.
“The big hit to me was he had two strikes on the pitcher and couldn’t put him away,” Snitker said. “Overall, if he didn’t hang a change-up to Rupp he leaves the game and it’s a pretty seven innings, really. But he was just in a position where he wasn’t afforded the luxury of giving up anything in the game tonight. The kid never quits and he keeps pitching.”
The Braves getting hurt by a hit from an opposing pitcher is something that’s happened with alarming frequency.
“We have a hard time with pitchers for some reason,” Snitker agreed. “It’s right there. You’ve got a guy 1-2 and you throw him a curveball. ... But that wasn’t (the deciding factor). We’ve got to score anyway. It’s one run, but still, yeah, I don’t know what that (pitchers getting hits vs. the Braves) is.”
Hernandez followed with a double and the Phillies had two runners in scoring position with one out and chance to do real damage. But that’s when Sims did what he’s done so impressive at the outset of his career: Wiggle out of trouble.
He struck out Freddy Galvis and got Nick Williams on an inning-ending ground-out to keep the deficit at one run when it could have multiplied quickly. At that point, hitters were 0-for-12 in against Sims with runners in scoring position and two outs.
Two innings later, he worked out of another jam after Florimon hit a leadoff single and went to second on Sims’ errant pickoff throw. This time Sims struck out Rupp and Nola before Hernandez’s inning-ending ground-out.
But as calm and composed as Sims has been in tight spots, no pitcher can expect to continue walking that tightrope without getting hurt. And in the sixth, after the Braves had tied the score in the top of the inning, Sims got into a jam he couldn’t work his way out of until the Phillies had taken a 3-1 lead.
Williams got things going for the Phillies with a one-out double, and Rhys Hoskins followed with a run-scoring double that pushed the first-year phenom’s hitting streak to 10 games and his RBI total to 25 in his first 19 major league games. One out later, Maikel Franco’s single pushed the lead to 3-1 and was the first hit allowed by Sims in 14 at-bats with two out and a runner in scoring position.
The Phillies added two runs in the ninth against Jim Johnson in the latest woeful performance from the fallen former closer, who gave up two hits and two walks while recording one out.
It hardly qualified as a moral victory, but the Braves did end Hoskins’ streak of homering in eight consecutive days in which the Phillies had a game. The only game the rookie didn’t homer in that stretch was in a doubleheader, when he homered in only one of the two.
The Phillies have a majors-worst 49-81 record, with 24 percent of their wins coming against one team, the Braves.
