Fifty Pitches to Nothing

Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper came to the plate eight times tonight and made eight outs. It took fifty pitches, twenty-six to Schwarber and twenty-four to Harper, and at no point in the evening did either of them stand on a base. Atlanta won 5-2 at Citizens Bank Park. If you want the game compressed into a single line, that is the line.

This morning I priced Atlanta's road record at about one-seventh of a game and said I was finished reporting it. It is 36-33 now. It moved by one and it decided nothing, which is roughly what I said it would do, and I will leave it there.

Here is what did decide it.

Chris Sale worked six innings on eight days' rest, allowed two runs, struck out seven and needed a hundred and three pitches to get through it. Six of the eight outs Schwarber and Harper made came against him, three of those by strikeout. His season now reads twenty-five starts, a 2.10 ERA, a hundred and eighty-four strikeouts against twenty-nine walks in a hundred and fifty innings. Eighteen of the twenty-five were quality starts. Opponents are hitting .219 against him and slugging .308.

A .308 slugging percentage means that when hitters do make contact against Sale, what comes of it is roughly what pitchers produce at the plate. Alec Bohm doubled in the second and homered in the fourth, and those two swings account for every run Philadelphia scored.

The other half of the ledger is stranger.

Atlanta scored five runs on eight hits, and the two doubles it hit produced nothing at all. Acuña doubled to center leading off the first, took third on a groundout, and was still standing there when Olson ended the inning. Albies doubled to left with two outs in the fifth and was still standing there when Olson ended that one too.

The three runs that mattered arrived in the second, out of parts nobody would draw up. Lane Thomas walked. Mauricio Dubón singled to left. Sean Murphy struck out. Austin Riley singled to right to score Thomas, and Harper misplayed the ball out there, which let Dubón take third instead of second. Ha-Seong Kim, hitting .117, grounded out to third, and Dubón scored on it because he was ninety feet away rather than a hundred and eighty. Acuña singled to center and Riley scored. Three singles, a walk, a groundout and an error, and not one of those runs required anybody to do anything difficult.

Then five innings of nothing, with a one-run lead sitting there.

Dubón ended that in the eighth, a two-run home run to left center off Orion Kerkering, three hundred and ninety feet, Mike Yastrzemski aboard. It was his eleventh of the season and his sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth runs batted in. He is hitting .268 with a .702 OPS and has been worth 2.3 wins, which is not a star and was never meant to be. It is what a roster needs on the nights its stars have ordinary ones, and tonight they had ordinary ones. Matt Olson batted fourth and went 0-for-4 without reaching base. Michael Harris II went 0-for-2. Acuña's 3-for-5 was the exception, and one 3-for-5 in September is a pleasant evening, not an answer to anything.

Behind Sale, Didier Fuentes took the seventh and eighth and Raisel Iglesias took the ninth. Between them they faced nine hitters and retired nine, on thirty-three pitches, three strikeouts, no baserunners. Atlanta's staff finished with ten strikeouts and one walk.

Which brings us to the standings. Atlanta is 84-57, five games clear of Philadelphia at 79-62, with twenty-one to play for each. The magic number is seventeen: Atlanta's wins plus Philadelphia's losses have to reach a hundred and sixty-two, plus one for the tie. And a figure I checked twice because it did not look right: Atlanta is 6-1 against Philadelphia this season. Six more are still to be played, three here through Monday and three at Truist the following weekend, with a great deal of time for that number to change.

There is a temptation to file a night like this under grinding it out. The phrase does no work. What happened is that a starting pitcher removed the two hitters Philadelphia is built around from the evening entirely, a bullpen retired everyone it saw, and a lineup scored five runs without a single at-bat that would make a highlight package. None of that requires anybody to be hot. None of it is a matter of feel. For a month this club's lead has been argued over as a possible artifact of its own ballpark, and the counter-evidence, when it finally showed up, took the least interesting form available: strikeouts, singles, and an error by somebody else.

That is the kind that holds up. Three more here.