NEW YORK – Two days after Julio Teheran was named a first-time National League All-Star, the Braves ace got whacked by the Mets and outpitched by a rookie who mowed down Atlanta hitters whenever they threatened to score.
Teheran (8-6) gave up five runs and a career-high 11 hits in just 3 1/3 innings of an 8-3 loss Tuesday night at Citi Field, the third consecutive defeat for the Braves since a nine-game winning streak.
“Some balls just came back over the plate on him,” said manager Fredi Gonzalez, whose Braves dropped back into a tie for first place in the National League East with the Nationals, who were rained out. “Just one of those starts. The young man is bound to have a bad one. You go out there 30, 35 times, you’re going to have a bad one.”
Teheran’s outing matched a May 14 start at San Francisco as the shortest of his career. Meanwhile, Mets counterpart Jacob deGrom (2-5) matched a career best with 11 strikeouts in seven scoreless innings and allowed seven hits and no walks. The right-hander has 19 strikeouts in 12 innings of two starts against the Braves in the past week.
Braves hitters were 3-for-13 with runners in scoring position and have gone 5-for-31 in those situations during the past three losses. Their only hits with runners in scoring position Tuesday were Jason Heyward’s eighth-inning single, and singles by B.J. Upton and Freddie Freeman in the ninth, with Freeman’s driving in two runs.
Heyward and Upton had three hits apiece and the Braves finished with 13 hits.
“I looked up at one point in the ninth inning and we had 12 hits and one run,” Upton said. “I guess we caught one of those fluke games. Didn’t really get many guys in scoring position, and we hit some balls hard with some guys in scoring position and just didn’t get the results we wanted.”
All of Teheran’s worst performances this season have come on the road, where he’s 5-5 with a 3.98 ERA in 10 starts. He’s 3-1 with a majors-best 1.23 ERA in nine home starts.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Just one of those games. I don’t know why it happens always on the road like this. Sometimes at home I just feel different because of fans and that kind of stuff. I don’t know.”
After throwing a three-hit, nine-inning shutout at Philadelphia on April 16 – the only regular-season shutout by a visiting pitcher since Citizens Bank Park opened in 2004 – Teheran has gone 3-4 with a 5.23 ERA in his past seven road starts and allowed 51 hits in 41 1/3 innings.
During that same period he has a 3-1 record and 1.05 ERA in eight home starts, with only 31 hits allowed in 60 innings.
He gave up a career-high 10 hits three times in 52 career starts before Tuesday – twice against the Nationals and on June 11 at Coors Field, when he was charged with seven runs in 6 1/3 innings.
Before Tuesday, the only time Teheran lasted fewer than five innings since the beginning of the 2013 season was May 14 at San Francisco, when he surrendered seven hits, five runs (four earned) and a career-high five walks in 3 1/3 innings. He complained of having trouble gripping the ball that day, much as he had in some other West Coast games.
Teheran thinks the drier air in California must be a factor in that situation. That certainly wasn’t an issue Tuesday on a warm, humid night at Citi Field, where the Mets were all over him from the outset.
“I feel like everything I threw they were just swinging,” he said. “They were just swinging at everything I was throwing in the (strike) zone. I was throwing some pitches that were out of the zone and they still hit them.”
He gave up a first-inning leadoff homer to Curtis Granderson, who also hit the game-tying eighth-inning homer off reliever Luis Avilan in Monday’s series opener, which the Mets won 4-3 in 11 innings. Granderson hit a leadoff homer against the Braves’ Alex Wood on June 30 and has four homers in the past five games against the Braves.
The Mets got three runs in the second inning on five hits including Daniel Murphy’s two-run double, and another run on three hits in the third. When Teheran gave up a single and walk within the first three batters of the fourth, he was replaced by David Hale.
“(Teheran) has been great for us all year,” Upton said. “They took some good pitches and hit strikes, and they can swing the bats. You don’t see that much from Julio, but today was just one of those days.”
The Braves wasted a scoring opportunity after a leadoff single by Upton in the first inning, then wasted another after a leadoff single by Heyward in the second inning. In each case the next two batters struck out – Andrelton Simmons and Freddie Freeman in the first inning, and Chris Johnson and Tommy La Stella in the second.
“He’s got a good two-seamer, a good cutter, a good slider,” Upton said. “He’s got four pitches that are pretty good, and you add the velocity to that, he can be pretty tough definitely if he’s hitting spots.”
In the second inning, Heyward stole second and third before Christian Bethancourt struck out, the third consecutive strikeout in the inning for deGrom, who did that again when he struck out the side in the fifth.
“We had men on third a couple of times and didn’t get productive outs; we got punch-outs,” Gonzalez said. “When we were rolling (during the winning streak) that’s where we got a run in, we didn’t fail. Like I’ve said, it’s easier said than done. Guys want to put the ball in play, but a guy throwing 94, 95 miles an hour can punch you out.”
DeGrom had 10 strikeouts through five innings, one shy of his best in 10 previous starts. He matched that career-high total when he struck out pinch-hitter Dan Uggla looking to end the seventh inning with a runner at second base.
