The Braves are going so bad they can’t even depend on their strange hex over Nationals right-hander Stephen Strasburg to spark their moribund offense.
Strasburg dominated the Braves like most starters do nowadays, but like he rarely ever does. The Braves again wasted strong pitching—Ervin Santana was the victim this time—while losing 4-2 Monday at Turner Field.
The Nationals can clinch the NL East by winning one of the remaining two games in the series. The Braves lost their fourth game in a row and seventh of eight as their postseason chances continue to shrink with 12 games to go.
“I like the effort, I like the intensity,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “All of those things are good but you’ve got to win ballgames.”
The Braves didn’t score until Justin Upton knocked a one-out, RBI double in the ninth inning off reliever Rafael Soriano. Christian Bethancourt’s two-out RBI single trimmed the lead to 4-2 and he went to second on a wild pitch.
B.J. Upton hit a sharp grounder at Ian Desmond, who knocked it down before recovering and throwing Upton out by half a step to end the game.
“It’s a good sign but at the same time we had the whole game to do it and we waited until the last minute,” Braves shortstop Andrelton Simmons said of the rally. “We’ve got to do a better job getting it done earlier in the game.”
Strasburg didn’t leave them many openings. The Braves banged out three runs against him in a victory at Washington last week but in the rematch he held them scoreless with just five hits (four singles) over seven innings.
In four previous starts against the Braves this season, Strasburg was 0-3 with a 7.17 ERA. He’d been winless in his past nine starts against the Braves. And he was 3-7 with a 4.61 ERA in 16 career starts against the Braves, 37-23 with a 2.90 ERA in 90 starts against everyone else.
“He’s a pretty darn good pitcher every time we have faced him,” Gonzalez said. “Those numbers don’t bear that but he’s a guy that we respect. He’s been a big pitcher for them.”
The Braves got just three base runners past first against Strasburg on Monday. The first of them, B.J. Upton, was thrown out trying to take third base on a pitch in the dirt in the third inning. Jason Heyward singled to lead off the fifth and went to third on Strasburg’s wild pick-off attempt but Chris Johnson, Christian Bethancourt and B.J. Upton left Heyward stranded.
The Braves had one final chance to break through against Strasburg when Andrelton Simmons doubled with two outs in the sixth inning. But Freddie Freeman struck out looking and then let his frustrations boil over.
Home plate umpire Tim Timmons ejected Freeman after he broke his bat while slamming it in the dirt in protest. Manager Fredi Gonzalez came out to argue and kicked a broken piece of Freeman’s bat, so Simmons ejected him, too.
Freeman said he didn’t say anything to Timmons before the ejection.
“I just thought it was a ball,” Freeman said. “After looking at it (on replay) it was a ball. But I guess it was a little frustration built up at a pivotal point in the game. It’s kind of how things have been going. I got a bad call there and unfortunately I let the frustration take over.”
That’s about as much energy as the Braves showed against the Nationals until it was too late. That’s not including Santana, who halted his string of lackluster starts at two by holding Washington to three hits and two runs over six innings.
Santana was perfect through two innings with four strikeouts. The Nationals finally got a base runner when Wilson Ramos walked to lead off the third and he scored when Denard Span followed Strasburg’s sacrifice with a double down the right-field line.
Santana worked around Jayson Werth’s lead-off double in the fourth inning but Ramos smacked a home run to center field to begin the fifth for a 2-0 Nationals lead. Strasburg’s RBI single in the seventh off Luis Avilan proved to be enough.
“From a pitching standpoint, we don’t have to be perfect because we trust our teammates and we know what we can do and what we can’t,” Santana said. “We’ve had good success against Strasburg. It was tough today. At the same time, we just have to keep our mind right and go get it tomorrow.”
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