This will sound weird, but the Atlanta Braves missed a real chance Thursday night. Yes, they were matched against the best pitcher in baseball and yes, they were outscored 6-1 and outhit 11-5 and out-fielded all ends up. Still, Game 1 could have been a real game, as opposed to the slink-off-into-the-early-morning drubbing it became.
The best in the business wasn’t nearly at his best. Clayton Kershaw’s line – one earned run over seven innings; three hits, three walks and 12 big fat strikeouts – looks dandy, but he needed 77 pitches to record the first 12 outs. For once, the big-swinging Braves didn’t appear inclined to aid and abet the opposing pitcher. They struck out only three times over the first 4 2/3 innings, over which Kershaw had difficulty throwing anything but his slider for strikes.
“We wanted to make him pitch a little bit,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “You look up after four innings and see 77 pitches and you feel very pretty about your chances. But he is who he is. He turned it up the next three innings. But offensively we had a good game plan.”
It wasn’t until the fifth inning, on Kershaw’s 87th pitch, that he threw his signature “12-to-6” curve for a strike. Almost inevitably, it came against B.J. Upton, who was deployed as a pinch-hitter and who swung twice and missed before taking a 1-2 breaker for Strike 3. By then Kershaw had found himself, leaving the Braves with no shot.
But they had one earlier. Down 5-0 after 4 ½ innings, the Braves scored in the fifth – on Chris Johnson’s RBI single to left-center — and had men at first and third with two out. Andrelton Simmons, who’d walked on a 3-2 pitch his first time up, worked the count full again. This time he swung and missed a slider. The inning was over, and the game essentially was, too.
“I wasn’t very efficient all night,” Kershaw said. And also this: “My fastball command wasn’t great.”
Kershaw would strike out nine of the final 11 Braves faced. He exited after seven innings, having thrown 124 pitches — 48 balls against 76 strikes, an imprecise ratio – but having lasted long enough that the Dodgers’ bullpen didn’t need to get ahead of itself. The bearded Brian Wilson, who saved the final two games of the 2010 Division Series for the Giants at Turner Field, handled the eighth. Kenley Jansen dispensed with the ninth.
Kershaw on his 124 pitches: “In postseason, pitch count kind of goes out the door. You get taken out early during the regular season to get ready for a game like this.”
In the end, the expected mismatch – the Dodgers’ ace against the team that tied for the National League lead in strikeouts – wound up being one. And Kris Medlen, who’d been the Braves’ best starting pitcher in September, was pretty ordinary this night. You don’t often beat L.A. on a night your starter yields five earned runs in four innings and their starter is Kershaw. Those five runs indeed scored without benefit of an error, which isn’t to say the Braves fielded flawlessly.
Old baseball saw: The batted ball will always find a weak glove. Case study: This game.
The Dodgers’ second run scored on A.J. Ellis’ double that darted under the glove of left fielder Evan Gattis, who’s a catcher by trade. Their third run was scored by Carl Crawford, who reached on a grounder that Elliot Johnson, the Kansas City castoff who replaced Dan Uggla at second base, should have handled. Their fifth run was scored by Ellis, whose double to right eluded Justin Upton. In those three runs we saw the trickle-down effect wrought by the abject failures of Uggla and B.J. Upton.
Had B.J. Upton been playing center field, leaving left to his brother Justin and right to Jason Heyward, both doubles would have been caught. Had Uggla, who’s a better fielder – yes, that’s correct – than Johnson, been playing second base, Medlen would have retired the Dodgers in order in the third. As it happened, Adrian Gonzalez hoisted a two-out homer to make it 4-0.
“He’d swung and missed at a first-pitch changeup earlier,” Medlen said. “Almost as I was letting it go (on Gonzalez’s second at-bat), I felt like he was sitting on it … But he’s one of the best hitters in the game, and he put a good swing on it. It was an 0-0 changeup, a bad 0-0 changeup.”
Oh, and about Elliot Johnson: The game ended with him striking out looking with two men in scoring position. Had Uggla been on the postseason roster, there was always a slight chance he might, as the vernacular has it, “run into one” and hit a ball 400 feet. (For all his flailing, Uggla did hit 22 homers. Johnson hit two, none as a Brave.)
Moral of our story: Actions do have consequences. The consequence of this was that the Braves forfeited home-field advantage and must beat Zack Greinke in Friday’s Game 2 to give themselves hope in this best-of-five. “There’s not a lot of room for error (against Kershaw),” Medlen said, “and I had a lot of error tonight.”
Maybe it was too much to expect the Braves to beat Kershaw in Game 1, but they’ll probably have to beat him if they plan on winning the series. And, not to go all gloom-and-doom so soon, but they might have just missed their best chance.
