The Braves were in for a breath of fresh air Tuesday night, with Tim Hudson on the mound and no Yankee, Red Sox, Oriole, or designated hitter of any kind in sight.
The Braves settled back into National League play and a sense of normalcy in a 8-1 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks to open a 10-game homestand, their longest of the season.
The Braves had the better, or at least the healthier, Hudson on the mound and took advantage with eight dominant innings from the veteran sinkerballer. He allowed only one run on a Jason Kubel homer despite working on a sore left ankle, while Arizona's Daniel Hudson had to leave the game with forearm stiffness in the second inning.
The Braves piled up double-digit hits for the fifth consecutive game with 17, matching a season-high for a nine-inning game, and this time they had the starter on the mound to take full advantage. The Braves scored five runs in the first two innings to give Hudson the kind of lead he knows what to do with; he moved to 148-5 for his career when his team scores him four or more runs.
The three add-on runs in the seventh and eighth innings were just to fill out the box score. The Braves had seven players with two or more hits, led by Chipper Jones with his first three-hit game since doing it in back-to-back games May 4 and 5 in Colorado. Freddie Freeman went 3-for-4 with a double and two RBIs. Michael Bourn had two hits, including his seventh home run of the season, two more than his previous career-high of five in 2008 for the Astros.
Freshly named NL player of the week Jason Heyward went 2-for-4 with a sacrifice fly to extend his career-best hitting streak to 11 games, after manager Fredi Gonzalez moved him up to the No. 2 hole.
The Braves won for the fourth time in five meetings with Arizona this season and the first at Turner Field.
Hudson used his early five-run cushion to settle in and throw strikes. After using 41 pitches to get through the first two innings, Hudson needed only 30 over the next four innings. He finished with 101 pitches in eight innings, including 77 for strikes before Gonzalez called on Anthony Varvaro to finish off the ninth.
Hudson has made his past five starts pitching on a sore left ankle, after his bone spurs flared up before his May 30 start against St. Louis. But the Braves have won four of those five starts. The discomfort on his landing leg might be costing Hudson a couple of mph on his two-seam fastball, but the Diamondbacks still couldn't muster much because of its movement. He allowed only seven hits, walked one and struck out seven.
Bourn started the game with a leadoff home run — his second home run in 10 career at-bats against Daniel Hudson — and Heyward followed with a single to set the tone for a 17-hit barrage, six of which the Braves piled up in the second inning.
Jones, Freeman and Andrelton Simmons strung together three consecutive hits in the second inning, and Bourn, Martin Prado and McCann followed shortly thereafter with three hits of their own to widen the lead to 5-0. That last run came on McCann's RBI single off reliever Josh Collmenter, the over-the-top right-hander familiar from his three previous starts against the Braves over the past two seasons.
