Today's Three Things: Atlanta breaks up Dodgers no-hit bid, but can't complete the comeback
The Atlanta Braves didn't have answers for what Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Mother Nature was throwing at them.
The Atlanta Braves dropped a rain-delayed affair against the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2-1, in Truist Park on Friday night.
Here’s Today’s Three Things from the contest.
The Turning Point
Today’s 7th inning.
With the Braves getting just one hit off of Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Matt Olson came to the plate against reliever Kirby Yates to open the 7th and got Atlanta on the board with a solo homer to center field. It wasn’t actually that well hit - 104.4 off the bat and just 411 feet, just barely clearing the 410 ft wall and Los Angeles centerfielder Andy Pages’ outstretched glove.
But it was the first sign of life for a Braves offense that struggled to get any sort of momentum.
Yates extinguished that momentum, getting consecutive flyouts to centerfield from Sean Murphy (105.6 mph off the bat) and Ozzie Albies (81.7 mph) before eliciting a strikeout of Michael Harris II to end the inning. Harris battled through a nine-pitch at bat, fouling off five different pitches, but also swinging at three different pitches well below the zone.
Harris, frustratingly, is on pace for only twenty walks across a full season of 600 plate appearances. In the Wild Card era, there are just 19 instances where a player had 600 or more plate appearances and had 20 or fewer walks, with the record being Ben Revere’s 13 walks in 626 plate appearances for the Phillies in 2014.
Today’s Player of the Game
In prototypical ‘revenge game’ fashion (Holmes was drafted in 2014’s first round by LA), Holmes went six full innings and came back out for the seventh, finishing with a career-high nine strikeouts. He scattered four hits and two walks across the outing, allowing one run on a 4th inning sacrifice fly and the other on a Mookie Betts solo homer in the 6th.
He opened the game with consecutive strikeouts of the ‘Big Three’ - Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman - and didn’t allow a hit until a Betts liner off of Holmes’ leg in the 4th inning. Per SportsRadar, Holmes is just the third pitcher to strike out the Big Three in the same inning, joining Brandon Pfaadt and David Robertson (twice) last year.
Holmes did a great job of mixing in his cutter tonight, throwing a season-high 20 of them in his 94 pitches. He also varied the locations, throwing some below the zone when someone was sitting slider and sometimes bringing it in the zone to be an alternative to the fastball if the hitter was looking for something hard.
There was an interesting convo during the broadcast about Holmes varying between a large leg kick and a slide step in his delivery - I’ll see if I can pull the data on the two mechanical options and explain that more in depth sometime in the future.
What You’ll Be Talking About
The no-hit bid.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto entered tonight’s game with a budding Cy Young argument - a MLB-best 1.06 ERA in six starts and 43 strikeouts in just 34 innings. Tonight just further pushed the candidacy.
Yamamoto took a no-hit bid into the sixth inning, finally losing it on Austin Riley’s double with two outs. I discussed in today’s third segment about LA pitchers usually leaving hittable pitches in the zone, and Yamamoto did that - the Braves put thirteen balls into play, including four hard-hit balls and three over 105 mph.
Only one, the Riley double in the 6th inning, actually fell for a hit. Olson and Murphy both sent rockets back up the middle, with Mookie Betts utilizing a semi-shift to snag a 107.7 mph screamer off the bat of Matt Olson in the 1st inning (xBA of .620) and Yamamoto himself, in an act of self-preservation, catching a 106.4 blast off the bat of Sean Murphy in the second (xBA of .590).
Marcell Ozuna didn’t break up the no-hit bid, but he did make things tough for Yamamoto. He drew two walks in his first two plate appearances before grounding out in the third, seeing a combined 26 pitches across the three at-bats. Considering Yamamoto only needed 91 pitches for six innings, a full 29% of all his pitches were thrown to Marcell Ozuna. This whole “deciding to have the best batter’s eye in recent history” thing of Ozuna’s is pretty nice - it reminds me of Ronald Acuña Jr just halving his career strikeout rate in his 2023 MVP season.
What’s Next for the Braves?
Weather permitting, game two’s tomorrow night at 7:15 PM as a national broadcast on Fox. Spencer Schwellenbach (1-2, 2.87 ERA) takes on Roki Sasaki (0-1, 3.35 ERA) in what is sure to be another intriguing pitching battle.