Eighty Pitches Across Two Days

Two postseason games have produced 270 pitches across 19 innings of Atlanta pitching, and the most useful thing in either box score is not a strikeout total. It is a column of dates.

Atlanta carried 11 pitchers into a best-of-three. It has used five. The three relievers among those five all worked Tuesday afternoon and again Wednesday afternoon, and tonight is Thursday.

Game 3 of the NL Wild Card Series sits in the 8:00 p.m. ET window at Truist Park, first pitch scheduled for 8:15 on NBC. Games 1 and 2 both began at 2:16 in the afternoon. Three games in three days, the first two finished in daylight, and a season that now fits inside the third.

What two days cost

Chris Sale gave 6.1 innings on 95 pitches Tuesday, struck out nine, and came out with two runners on and one out in the seventh. Didier Fuentes relieved him, and the box score credits Fuentes with 0.2 innings, 12 pitches, zero runs and a blown save, all at the same time. Every one of those is correct. J.T. Realmuto tripled Sale's two runners home; the runs charge to Sale, the blown save to Fuentes. That is the mechanism, and it makes the inning neither clean nor a lead Fuentes gave away.

Dylan Lee threw a scoreless eighth on 16 pitches and became the winning pitcher when Atlanta scored three in the bottom half. Raisel Iglesias finished it on seven.

Wednesday, Tyler Mahle gave seven innings and one run on 95 pitches — the same number Sale threw, which is a coincidence of two box scores rather than a ceiling; Sale's own high this season was 109. Lee came back out for the eighth, faced four hitters, allowed two home runs and got two outs on 15 pitches. Iglesias took the last out of the eighth and two more in the ninth on nine pitches. Fuentes finished the ninth, pitched the 10th, threw 21, and took the loss.

Add the two days together. Lee threw 31 pitches, Iglesias 16, Fuentes 33. Eighty between the three of them, on consecutive days, with nothing in between.

I wrote on Wednesday night that Lee's 0.97 WHIP "was a true description of 67 innings and a useless description of fifteen pitches", and I still think so. That cuts both ways. If a full season of reliever numbers cannot tell you how 15 pitches will go, it cannot tell you much about tonight either. What is left to count is who has thrown, how much, and when.

The six who have not thrown

Six of the 11 have not thrown a pitch in this series: Grant Holmes, Ray Kerr, Brent Suter, Dylan Dodd, Victor Mederos and Robert Suarez.

The easy way to read that list is as whatever remained after the real pitchers were spent. The last week of the regular season says otherwise.

On Friday, September 25 in Miami, Ray Kerr started — three innings, 32 pitches, no runs — and Grant Holmes followed him for four innings on 54 pitches in relief. On Saturday, Brent Suter started, his first start as a Brave, three innings on 43 pitches, and five relievers came in behind him: Dodd, Mederos, Suarez, and then Lee and Iglesias.

On Sunday, in the final game of the regular season, Atlanta pitched JR Ritchie, AJ Smith-Shawver and Elieser Hernández. Not one of the 11 arms the club would carry into October threw a pitch.

So the shape of tonight — an opener, a bulk arm behind him, a bridge to the back end — is not hypothetical. Atlanta ran it twice, six and five days ago, with the arms that have been idle ever since. What it was for has not been said. No statement from Walt Weiss on the Kerr and Holmes pairing has been published, and none on tonight. The usage is a fact. The intention behind it is not available, and supplying one would be the easiest mistake in this piece to make.

What the six are, individually, is more interesting than rested.

Holmes made 29 starts this season, two more than Sale, which is why I would not take the last-man-standing framing on Monday and will not take it now. He threw 151.2 innings at 3.44, and his most recent work was those four relief innings in Miami.

Kerr's 1.47 ERA over 18.1 innings is a true number about nine appearances since his contract was selected from Gwinnett in August, which is to say it describes a good month more precisely than it describes a pitcher.

Suter's Atlanta number is 1.63 across 13 appearances and 27.2 innings. The 3.36 on his season line is a two-club figure that includes 63.1 innings with the Angels at 4.12; he arrived on August 3 in a trade for shortstop Nacho Alvarez Jr. Dodd has made 48 appearances without a start, at 2.54 with 14 holds. Mederos has 30 appearances at 3.41.

And Robert Suarez carries a 1.06 ERA that is almost entirely a pre-injury number: he went on the injured list in late June with right elbow inflammation, moved to the 60-day list on September 1, and since being activated on September 23 has thrown exactly two major league innings and 21 pitches, allowing a run in each. I asked on September 23 what was left in that elbow. The answer is still two innings long.

The name nobody has said

As of 9:05 this morning, neither club has named a starter. The probable-pitcher field is empty on both sides of every feed that answers; ESPN's own Day 3 live file, published at 7:50, lists the Game 3 starters as "TBD vs. TBD." The field filled in for both clubs on the morning of Game 2, so the blank is a blank rather than a broken query.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday evening that Holmes "is expected to either start or pitch in bulk relief" against Aaron Nola. That is an expectation with the role still open inside it, and nothing has replaced it since. An opener is not a wild guess either. Atlanta used one six days ago.

I argued Wednesday morning that recent form predicts an October start better than a postseason résumé does. Tonight that argument has no name to attach itself to, which is its own kind of information.

The same problem, one dugout over

Philadelphia carried 12 pitchers and has also used five. Exactly one of its relievers worked both days: Alex McFarlane, 16 pitches Tuesday and four Wednesday. The rest of Wednesday afternoon belonged to Andrew Painter, a rookie who started 23 of his 25 appearances this season and then threw three scoreless innings on 37 pitches out of the bullpen.

That is the same solution sitting unused in Atlanta's bullpen — a starter asked to cover the middle of a game he did not begin.

Philadelphia also supplies the cleanest evidence that consecutive days are a real cost rather than a writer's device. Jhoan Duran threw 27 pitches in Game 1 and did not pitch in Game 2. Asked whether Duran would be available tonight, interim manager Don Mattingly said: "I hope." Dex spent Wednesday morning doubting that Duran's two-inning case rested on more than one August night, and the week has gone his way.

What the dates actually say

Nothing above says anyone cannot pitch. Consecutive days are a cost, not a disqualification, and two postseason games are far too few to describe how a first-year manager runs a bullpen over a season.

What the dates do is narrow the room. Atlanta has three relievers who threw on back-to-back days and six arms that have not thrown in four or five, and the second group is not the consolation prize. Two of them started games last week. One of them made more starts this season than Chris Sale.

Forty-four hours after tonight's eight o'clock slot, whoever is still playing opens a Division Series in Los Angeles. Tonight will be decided by swings, the way Wednesday was. But the number of ways Atlanta can get to 27 outs was set on Tuesday and Wednesday, by a calendar rather than an ERA.