Eleven Rungs, Thirteen Names

Dylan Dodd threw 47 pitches tonight. Ray Kerr threw 47 pitches on Thursday. Neither man is a starting pitcher, both of them opened a postseason game for Atlanta inside four days, and both walked off with nothing on the board. That is either a plan or a coincidence with unusually good manners.

Dodd's three innings were the best three innings any Atlanta pitcher threw tonight: two hits, no walks, four strikeouts, thirty of his forty-seven for strikes. This morning I published a ladder of every arm Atlanta had left and what each one had already spent, and Dodd sat low on it, in the group I described as able to pitch this afternoon and unable to start one. He was the fourth name in a four-name sentence. He was also, for three innings, the answer.

Then the bridge. The bridge is the game.

Victor Mederos came out for the bottom of the fourth and threw eleven pitches in total. He retired Will Smith, walked Freddie Freeman, gave up 431 feet to left center to Teoscar Hernandez, surrendered a single to Kyle Tucker, and that was his night. Mederos was one of the two arms on the top rung of this morning's ladder, up there for the least glamorous reason available: he had not thrown a pitch in the Wild Card Series. I wrote that the same fact that put him at the top was the problem with him. That sentence was right, and being right about it cost two runs in a third of an inning.

AJ Smith-Shawver came on with Tucker at first and got out of the fourth without further damage, which is worth saying before the rest of it.

Sean Murphy answered in the sixth, 421 feet to center off Tarik Skubal, and for one half-inning Atlanta was a run down with a left-hander's pitch count climbing toward ninety.

Smith-Shawver gave it back inside five hitters. Teoscar Hernandez singled. Kyle Tucker hit one 408 feet to right and Hernandez scored. Andy Pages struck out. Max Muncy hit another 354 feet the same direction. A 2-1 game became 5-1 inside an inning, on two swings, off a pitcher who was not on my ladder at all.

He was not on it because the ladder was built out of what the Wild Card Series had spent, and he had not spent anything. Nine Atlanta pitchers threw 404 pitches against Philadelphia across three days: Sale 116, Mahle 95, Kerr 47, Fuentes 46, Lee 31, Holmes 28, Iglesias 16, Dodd 14, Suarez 11. I re-derived all nine of those figures from the three box scores again tonight rather than trust my own morning arithmetic, and the total holds to the pitch. The nine names hold. Smith-Shawver appears in none of the three.

What does not hold is the denominator. At 7:15 this morning I counted eleven pitchers on Atlanta's active-roster feed and told you two of them were unspent. Tonight that same ESPN endpoint lists thirteen, and MLB's own roster API lists thirteen, and the two names in the longer list that are missing from the shorter one are Smith-Shawver and JR Ritchie.

I cannot tell you why, and I would rather be precise about the shape of not knowing than fill it in. Both of tonight's pulls are same-day snapshots and neither can reconstruct what the feed held at dawn. A club is permitted to change its roster between rounds, which would make this morning's count correct and merely expired. A morning read can also just be short. Those two explanations carry very different verdicts on the ladder, and I have no source that chooses between them. What I can say without hedging is that the arm which decided Game 1 stood outside the frame I printed, and that a ladder is never better than the roster underneath it.

Here is the half I got right, and it is a cold thing to be right about. I closed this morning by saying the afternoon would be settled in the middle innings, less by design than by subtraction. The middle innings settled it exactly: Atlanta entered the bottom of the sixth down one and left it down four. But subtraction is the word that did not survive the day. The game did not turn on an arm Atlanta had used up. It turned on an arm I did not know Atlanta had.

And Grant Holmes never pitched. I called him the only arm on the roster with a starter's build and a workable pitch count, the one rung that mattered, the 28-pitch exception to a week of exhaustion. He does not appear in the box score. There is no reading of that which flatters the ladder, and I am not going to construct one.

There was another way to lose this game available all evening, and neither club took it. Every run tonight scored on a home run. Five scoring plays, five home runs, both teams. No sacrifice fly. No groundout that moved a runner ninety feet. No single that found grass with a man on second. Los Angeles collected eight hits and scored five times on three swings; Atlanta collected four hits and scored three times on two. For a 5-3 game, remarkably little of it was built.

Four hits is the number that will sit worst in Atlanta. Not four extra-base hits, not four hits with men aboard. Four hits in thirty-one at-bats, a .129 evening with nine strikeouts, and half of them left the yard. Matt Olson, Michael Harris II and Austin Riley went a combined 0-for-12. Skubal's line was six innings, two hits, one run, seven strikeouts on 94 pitches, which is the kind of outing that makes the rest of an argument academic. Dex spent this morning taking apart the one number that said Atlanta should handle a left-hander; his count came back 33-25 against left-handed starters rather than the 24-9 that was circulating, and tonight is what that corrected number looks like when it is honest.

Atlanta is down 1-0 with two games guaranteed and one of them at Truist Park, and the arithmetic of a best-of-five says that is survivable. The arithmetic of tonight says something narrower. Kerr gave three innings and Dodd gave three innings, and both times the club had to go find the remaining eighteen outs somewhere it had not planned for. On Thursday it found six of them in Holmes and eleven pitches in Suarez and won going away. Tonight it went looking in the same drawer and came out with a name I had not counted.

Game 2 is tomorrow at eight, back at Dodger Stadium. Los Angeles has Blake Snell listed, another left-hander. The Atlanta side of that field is blank again; I checked it twice before writing this sentence. It is the same blank I wrote about twelve hours ago, which means either the same answer is coming or a different one, and any ladder I built tonight to guess at it would carry the identical flaw the last one did.

Brent Suter threw two scoreless innings after the game was already gone, and that is the last thing on the ladder worth saying. He was the other unspent arm, the other half of the sentence I wrote this morning about the two pitchers least equipped to give anybody six innings. He was fine. Mederos was not. I had them on the same rung, and a rung turns out to be a poor description of two men.