Four Runs at Once

Four runs changed hands in the sixth inning tonight. Nothing like that had happened to this team in eight days.

That is the number worth keeping. The score — San Francisco 7, Atlanta 3 — is only the consequence.

This morning, in this space, the argument was that Atlanta's seven-game winning streak said less than it appeared to. The margins ran 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1. Five one-run wins inside eight days is a coin flip called correctly five times, and a coin flip called correctly five times is not a roster built for October. It is a coin, behaving the way coins behave.

Twelve hours later the streak is over. And the honest thing to say is that this does not prove the morning right.

That is not modesty. It is the same argument. If seven wins were too small a sample to settle anything, one loss is smaller. A writer who spends the morning warning about sample size and the evening cashing one in has not made an argument — he has placed a bet and collected on it, which was rather the point.

So set the verdict down and look at the mechanism, because the mechanism is real.

Start with what did not change. Atlanta scored three runs on nine hits. In the two games before this one it scored two and three. Michael Harris II drove a ball 401 feet to center in the second. Drake Baldwin had two hits and a run batted in. Austin Riley had two hits. The lineup produced roughly the evening it has been producing all week.

What changed is that the other team scored seven.

The sixth inning is worth walking through slowly, because it contains the whole game. Osleivis Basabe led off against Bryce Elder and hit a ball 409 feet to center to tie it. Andrew Knizner singled. Nate Furman singled. Christian Koss laid down a sacrifice bunt, which means the only out Elder recorded in the inning was one San Francisco handed him. Elder left with runners on second and third. Dylan Lee threw fourteen pitches, and Turner Hill — pinch-hitting — doubled both of them home.

The runs went onto Elder's line. Five earned, eight hits in five and a third, three walks, his ERA up to 4.11. The inning belonged to both pitchers and to neither.

Two weeks ago, after Elder threw six innings of one-run baseball, the note here was that it was a data point and not an answer, because one start is a sample of two. Tonight is the next data point, and it went the other way. Three of them is still not an answer.

That keeps needing to be said because of why Elder is out there at all. Three right elbows came apart inside a single week, and the fifth start every fifth day still has to come from somewhere. A rotation assembled by subtraction does not get graded on the same curve as one assembled on purpose.

Then there is the opponent, which is the part that will get repeated tomorrow and probably should.

San Francisco is 57-81 and twenty-five and a half games out of its own division. It has now beaten Atlanta in five of six meetings this season. The same eight days that contained a three-game sweep of the Dodgers — 82-55, the best record in the National League West — ended against the worst team on the schedule. Baseball has a long memory for this sort of thing and has never once offered an explanation for it.

One line in the box score is worth keeping for its own sake. Ray Kerr threw three and a third innings on thirty-four pitches, allowed one hit, and struck out four, which gave a thin bullpen its Tuesday back. Absorbing the back half of a decided loss is the least glamorous value a pitching staff produces. This staff needs it more than most.

Atlanta is 82-56 and still leads the National League East by four and a half games over Philadelphia, who were in Arizona and still playing as this was written. Nothing about tonight is dangerous.

The split underneath it is the part to sit with: 48-24 at Truist Park, 34-32 everywhere else. Very good at home, and ordinary once the building changes. Twenty-nine thousand three hundred and forty-nine people watched this one, and the team now leaves for Washington, where AJ Smith-Shawver is listed as the probable starter.

Twenty-four games remain, and most of the ones that decide anything will be played somewhere other than here, at margins that have already demonstrated they can fall either way. Tonight they fell the other way once, in one inning, and once was enough.

The coin does not remember the seven. It never did.