The Mets completed a sweep of the free-falling Braves with a 10-2 rout Sunday at Turner Field, in a game that officially eliminated Atlanta from playoff contention, served as a microcosm of the failings of manager Fredi Gonzalez’s team, and caused pitcher Ervin Santana’s frustrations with his team’s lack of offense to finally boil over publicly.
“It’s tough because we haven’t been playing very good lately,” Santana said after the Braves’ eighth loss in nine games, a stretch in which they’ve scored a total of 15 runs. “As a pitcher, we have our confidence up, but at the same time you have to, like, throw a complete-game shutout or something like that to get a win. I mean, it’s tough. Very tough.”
The Braves are eight games behind the Pirates for the second and final spot in the National League wild-card standings with only seven games left on the schedule. Thus, they are done. The Braves will miss the postseason for the second time in Gonzalez’s four seasons as manager, their fate sealed this time as in 2011 by an epic September collapse.
They went 9-18 in September 2011 to blow an 8 1/2-game wild-card lead and got eliminated on the final day. They are 4-14 this September, and the only question now is whether Gonzalez and general manager Frank Wren, among others, will keep their jobs through the final week of the season that starts Monday.
“I thought (Santana) kept us in the game,” Gonzalez said. “But today we didn’t play good baseball. Today we got officially eliminated from the wild card spot, and that hurts.”
It was a typical Braves loss in several ways:
There were 10 strikeouts in the first five innings against Mets rookie pitcher Jacob deGrom (9-6), by a Braves team that’s struck out more than any other NL team except the youthful Marlins.
There were only four hits and no homers for the Braves, who entered Sunday with a majors-worst .207 batting average and only six homers in September. They produced five hits or fewer for the eighth time in 18 September games.
There was Andrelton Simmons grounding into an inning-ending double play with two on in the sixth, the 24th time he’s grounded into a double play, second-most in the NL. (The Braves’ Chris Johnson is third with 22.)
There was the Braves going 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position, lowering their average another tick to .238 in those situations, fourth-worst in the majors.
And there were a meager two runs scored by the Braves, marking the 60th time in 155 games they have mustered two or fewer runs. They fell to 8-52 in those games.
The only thing that wasn’t typical of their recent performance Sunday was the outing by Santana (14-10), who gave up five runs, six hits and two walks in five innings, including three runs in the fourth that pushed the Mets’ lead to 5-0.
The Braves have scored two or fewer runs while Santana has been in the game in 15 of his 30 starts, and he conceded for the first time that he’s felt added pressure knowing there’s been little margin for error because of poor run support. All season, Santana and other Braves starters had previous denied or downplayed suggestions about there being added pressure.
“Of course” there is, Santana said. “Of course you’ve got that on your mind. If you are a starting pitcher you’re going to have that on your mind every time when you see teams like this and we don’t score any runs. I mean, it’s tough for us because you know when we’re playing like this, you give up two runs, three runs, you know it’s going to be a tough game. It’s hard.”
Wren, who has come under considerable fire for assembling this dysfunctional offense, watched stoicly from his suite above the field behind home plate. Some familiar with the situation believe Wren is more likely to be fired than Gonzalez, though neither appears to have a lot of job security at this point.
There could be moves made at any time, since the Braves have been eliminated and might not want to leave anyone twisting in the wind amid growing speculation during the final week of the season.
Hitting coaches Greg Walker and Scott Fletcher will almost certainly not be retained by the Braves, and other coaches could be dismissed as well.
The Braves have one home run during their 1-8 fall from playoff contention, an almost incomprehensibly bad nine-game stretch that began with being swept in three games at Texas by a Rangers team with the worst record in baseball. Atlanta has also scored two runs or fewer in all but four games during a 2-11 stretch.
Braves starters lead the majors with 107 quality starts, and no other team had more than 100 before Sunday. Meanwhile, Atlanta ranks 29th in the majors in scoring, and the Braves (192) and Reds (188 before Sunday) are the only teams to score fewer than 210 runs since the All-Star break.
“I mean, seriously I don’t know what to tell you,” Santana said. “From a pitching standpoint, we do our job. I mean, we don’t score any runs. I don’t know. Seriously, I don’t know.”
Santana notched his 1,500th career strikeout Sunday, but derived little satisfaction from the milestone.
“We got the loss anyway,” he said. “You enjoy it for a second, and then we’re back to reality and we lose again. It’s not worth it.”
The Mets got a run after a leadoff hit in each of the first two innings. In the fourth, after he walked Curtis Granderson with one out, Santana was stung by this three-batter sequence: Kirk Nieuwenhuis double, Anthony Recker sacrifice fly (and terrible throw by center fielder B.J. Upton), and Ruben Tejada home run.
The Braves cut thet lead to 5-2 in the fifth on two hits, two walks and an error. Rookie pinch-hitter Joey Terdoslavich struck out with the bases loaded with one out. After Emilio Bonifacio drew a bases-loaded walk to bring in the second run of the inning, rookie Phil Gosselin struck out to end the inning.
DeGrom is 8-1 with a 1.90 ERA in his past 12 starts, a stretch that began with seven shutout innings against the Braves on July 8. In his past two starts against Atlanta, the right-hander is 2-0 with a 1.38 ERA and 21 strikeouts in 13 innings, including eight strikeouts through the first four perfect innings Sunday.
“That’s been our M.O. for a couple of years — we struck out a lot,” Gonzalez said. “And today we ran across a strikeout pitcher. We battled and had an opportunity to chase him out in the fifth inning, and he made some pitches.”
The Mets’ sweep gave them a 10-9 season-series win over the Braves, who are now just a half-game ahead of third-place New York in the NL East standings. The Braves are also just two games ahead of fourth-place Miami in the East, having already lost 10 of 19 against the Marlins this season.
The Braves are 1-5 on a 10-game homestand that concludes with four against the Pirates beginning Monday — games that no longer have the significance many had expected they would before the Braves laid an egg on their 2-7 road trip that ended at Texas.
They can’t catch the Pirates now, and the Braves need to win five of their remaining games against the Pirates and at Philadelphia just to avoid their first losing season since going 72-90 in 2008.
“We obviously were shooting for a little better result and shooting for an interesting series against (the Pirates),” Johnson said. “But we’ll give them all we’ve got. We’ll play hard and continue to work hard, and that’s all we can do. I think it’s just out of respect for our organization, ourselves, the name on the back of your jersey (and) the front of your jersey, go out there and play hard, try to get a win, no matter who’s out there.”
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