MIAMI -- Dan Uggla spoke Monday about the difficult aspect of playing for the Marlins with Sun Life Stadium as a home field.
“It would get tough sometimes going on the road and playing in front of packed houses, then coming home to this,” said the Braves second baseman, who spent the previous five seasons with Florida. “You’d go out to stretch and there’d be 500 people in the stands.”
Playing in the mostly empty multi-purpose stadium isn’t as depressing in short stints for visiting former Marlins, particularly when things go like they did Monday night for Uggla and the Braves in a 8-5 series-opening win.
Uggla extended his hitting streak to 29 games, two shy of the Atlanta franchise record, and fellow ex-Marlin Alex Gonzalez hit a three-run homer to help Braves pitcher Derek Lowe snap a three-start losing skid.
Lowe (7-10) was charged with two runs, six hits and three walks in six innings to win for just the fourth time in 17 starts. He had been 0-3 with a 9.00 ERA in his previous three starts, including seven earned runs and 10 hits allowed in four innings of Tuesday’s 9-3 loss at Washington.
John Buck's two-run homer off skidding Braves reliever Scott Proctor in the ninth inning made things interesting. The Braves felt compelled to bring in closer Craig Kimbrel after Proctor walked the next batter.
Kimbrel struck out the next two batters for his 35th save, five from tying the major league rookie record.
By hustling to beat out an infield single leading offthe fifth inning, Uggla tied Rowland Office’s 1976 hitting streak as the second longest in Atlanta Braves history, trailing only Rico Carty’s 31-gamer in 1970.
“Oh, yeah, dude, every hit counts," said Uggla, who is one game from tying the longest hitting streak in the majors this season, a 30-gamer by the Dodgers’ Andre Ethier. "I’ll take the infield ones with the doubles in the gaps. Hitting ain’t easy.”
Chipper Jones, Freddie Freeman and newcomers Michael Bourn and Jose Constanza collected two hits apiece for the Braves, who earned their fourth win in five games and improved to 4-3 on a nine-game trip.
Announced attendance was 20,330, but there appeared to be no more than a quarter of that in the stadium at any time.
Constanza has an eight-game hitting streak and a .421 average in his first 10 games since arriving from Triple-A Gwinnett. The 27-year-old rookie had 3,164 plate appearances in 743 minor league games before getting his first callup July 29.
Despite the score and sparse crowd, there was plenty of emotion from the Braves, who saw manager Fredi Gonzalez and Freeman ejected for disputing balls and strikes.
It was the first major league ejection for Freeman, who was tossed by home-plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt after complaining about his strikeout to end the top of the eighth inning.
Gonzalez was thrown out by Wendelstedt after arguing balls and strikes from the dugout in the bottom of the fourth inning, his third ejection of the season.
The Braves staked Lowe to a 4-0 lead in the second inning when Bourn, Prado and Freeman drove in all of the runs with three consecutive two-out hits off Marlins left-hander Brad Hand (1-4). Bourn singled to drive in the first run and Prado hit a ground-rule double for a 2-0 lead before Freeman drove in two runs with another single.
The Marlins scored two runs in the third against Lowe, but the Braves took a commanding lead on Gonzalez’s three-run homer in the fifth, two batters after Uggla's infield hit.
After consecutive singles by Uggla and Jones to start the inning, Gonzalez blistered a 2-2 pitch over the left-field wall for a 7-2 lead.
“Sometimes you’re trying [so hard] to pitch a good game, trying to get the results you expect to have," Lowe said of the big lead. "That’s why those runs were so important for me. I could finally say, ‘OK, you don’t have to worry about giving up runs, you can go out there and pitch.' And any time you start getting outs, you start gaining confidence. That’s what this game’s about.
“This is a game where you can kind of go out there and pitch the way you’re supposed to pitch.”
