On a night when the Braves racked up 17 hits, matched their season high with a seven-run inning, led 9-1 after two innings and got four hits apiece from Freddie Freeman and A.J. Pierzysnki, they left not only with a wrenching 13-12 loss to Dan Uggla and the Washington Nationals, but with concern about their ace pitcher, Julio Teheran.
The story became Dan Uggla, the former Atlanta second baseman who had five RBIs and hit a towering three-run homer off Jason Grilli in the ninth inning to hand the Braves closer his first blown save and give the fans who’d booed him for two nights a reason to dislike Uggla even more.
It was the third hit of the game for Uggla, including a two-run triple. He had 10 RBIs all of last season with the Braves, who released him in July, and the Giants, who released him after four games.
“To score 12 runs and to lose is hard to fathom with our opening-day guy on the mound,” Pierzynski said. “Go up 9-1 in the second inning, we’re supposed to win. Give them credit, they just kept coming back and chipping away. Unfortunately in the ninth inning, we made a mistake to Uggla and he didn’t miss it.
“Just sucks, there’s no other way to put it. Just sucks.”
Did we mention the Braves are paying almost the entirety of Uggla’s $13.2 million salary this season, more than they are paying anyone on their own roster?
“We go out and score seven, eight, nine runs, and they just kept hanging around, and we let them do that,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “This is the major leagues. Anybody can run you out of the ballpark, and that’s what happened there at the end. We just kind of let them hang around.”
Uggla was booed lustily every time his name was introduced the past two nights in the first two games of the series. He tripled in each game, but it was the long homer off Grilli that left most in a crowd of 14,833 in stunned disbelief, after Grilli gave up a one-out single to Jose Lobaton and walked Danny Espinosa. Uggla crushed an 0-2 pitch.
“I can’t lie, that felt good,” Uggla said. “It was a fastball. I was able to catch up to it. Once I hit it, a kind of feeling of ease came over me because I hadn’t felt that feeling in a long time. That was my first homer this year. It was cool.”
Freeman was asked about Uggla being booed in his first games back at Turner Field.
“As a friend, it’s tough, obviously,” Freeman said. “He played the game the right way, hustled every single time. Fans are going to react how fans want to react. It’s definitely tough, but he kind of shut them up in the ninth inning.”
Even before the Uggla blast into the drizzle and well up into the left-field bleachers, all was not roses and radiance for the home team at Turner Field.
The Nationals, who snapped a six-game losing skid, had eight runs in the fifth through seventh innings to erase most of Atlanta’s huge early lead on the way to evening the series at a game apiece.
The concern was not just that the Nationals rallied, but that they did so much of that middle-innings damage against Teheran, the opening-day starter, who stumbled to his third consecutive rough outing.
Teheran was charged with 10 hits, seven runs (three earned) and two homers in 5 2/3 innings. In his past three starts, Teheran has pitched a total of 15 innings and given up 20 hits, six homers, 19 runs (13 earned) and seven walks.
“I am a little bit (concerned), because that’s not him,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “He’s usually a guy you give him a lead, he’s a bulldog and you have to go try to get the ball out of his hand in the eighth inning with a 12-run lead. So yeah, I’m a little concerned. Lot of home runs. I think the stuff is there, the miles per hour is there, but the location is not…. I’m just looking from the side of the field, I’ll look at the (video) tomorrow morning, but it looks like they had some pretty good swings all night at him, in all kinds of different counts.”
Teheran again said he is healthy, feels great physically, and that he’s not sure what is wrong and will just keep working to get it ironed out.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’ve just got to keep working, get ready for the next one…. Still working to find out what’s going on. I feel really good, my pitches, everything feels good. It’s more location than anything else. I feel good with all my pitches, but I miss sometimes. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Teheran got no decision while allowing a career-high four homers and five runs in five innings of an 8-7 Braves win at Toronto May 17, and took the loss at New York on Thursday when he gave up four runs and issued five walks in 4 1/3 innings.
Tuesday, he struggled after being staked to an eight-run lead in the first two innings, in a game that felt like it was being played at Coors Field, with so many balls hit to the gaps by both teams and a couple over the fences by Nationals hitters.
The Braves knocked around rookie A.J. Cole in his major-league debut, getting nine hits and nine runs (four earned) against the 23-year-old top prospect.
Freeman matched a career high with his third four-hit game and first since 2013, while 38-year-old Pierzysnki continued to bathe in his recently discovered fountain of youth, pounding four hits and a sacrifice fly for four RBIs, giving him 12 RBIs in 11 games and raising his batting average to .439.
It was his 20th career game with at least four hits, and Pierzynski has hit safely in all 11 games he’s played this season. He also drew a one out walk in the ninth inning before Alberto Callaspo grounded into a force and Jonny Gomes flied out to end the game.
Albert Callaspo, Jace Peterson and Cameron Maybin added two hits apiece for the Braves, who lose for only the 15th time in their past 44 games against the Nationals and the ninth time in 21 games since the beginning of the 2014 season. Freeman has had eight hits in three consecutive multi-hit games since a 1-for-18, seven-strikeout stretch over five games.
The Nationals jumped to a 1-0 lead in the first inning when Denard Span led off with a single and scored on Bryce Harper’s two-out double. The Braves came back with two runs in the first on three hits including Callaspo’s RBI double.
Atlanta blitzed Cole for seven runs (five earned) in the second inning on six hits, an intentional walk, a sacrifice bunt and an extremely costly error by the young pitcher, who missed a toss from first baseman Ryan Zimmerman while covering first on Callaspo’s bases-loaded, two-out grounder.
Peterson and Maybin had consecutive singles to start the inning, and both advanced on a Teheran sacrifice bunt. The Nationals intentionally walked Nick Markakis to load the bases and set up a potential double-play grounder by Simmons, who made them pay by lining a single through the left side of the infield for a 4-1 lead.
One out later, Pierzynski singled to reload the bases. When Cole missed the toss to first base, two runs scored for a five-run lead. Kelly Johnson followed with a double to the right-center gap drove in two more.
Peterson, after not having a multi-hit game this season until two hits in Monday’s series opener, got two hits in the second inning Tuesday. His single to center drove in the seventh run of the inning before Cole finally got Maybin on a groundout. The Braves had sent 11 batters to the plate and scored seven runs, the last five unearned and with two outs.
Span had four hits including two doubles and a homer, all against Teheran. He had a leadoff double in the third inning and scored, and had another leadoff double in the fifth to spark a four-run inning against Teheran that included Jose Lobaton’s first homer of the season, a three-run shot with two out.
When Span homered with two out in the sixth inning, Teheran was pulled. The Nationals added three runs against left-hander Luis Avilan in the seventh inning to pull within a run.
