Seven Strikeouts and a Different Arm

I wrote yesterday about eighteen innings. About Martin Perez's scoreless streak and what it meant for the arms behind Chris Sale -- whether the rotation depth the Braves have been assembling could hold against a lineup that hits better than the fifty-two-win Mets.

The question still stands. The Dodgers have not volunteered to answer it. But on Wednesday night at Truist Park, a different arm offered something worth measuring.

Tyler Mahle pitched six innings. He allowed four hits and one earned run. He struck out seven. He threw ninety-three pitches, fifty-eight for strikes. It was the best start of his brief tenure as a Brave, and also his first win in an Atlanta uniform.

The number worth examining is not seven strikeouts. It is 4.64 -- his ERA after tonight, down from the 5.13 he carried when the Giants traded him to Atlanta for minor league reliever Anthony Molina ahead of the trade deadline. Battery Power graded the deadline a disastrous day for Alex Anthopoulos. Yahoo agreed. The consensus was that Mahle, with his 3-9 record and a pitch mix that had stopped fooling right-handed hitters, was the kind of acquisition that inspires the word "underwhelming."

Two starts later, his ERA has dropped half a run. The pitch mix, according to the Braves' coaching staff, has been adjusted. One game is not evidence. But two starts -- including a seven-strikeout, one-earned-run performance against a division rival -- is the beginning of a pattern. And patterns, as I have noted more than once this summer, are what survive October.

The offense provided more than enough cushion. Austin Riley went three for four with a home run -- his fifteenth of the season -- and a double. Riley's batting average sits at .225, which is not where a franchise third baseman expects to finish a season. But the exit velocities have returned to the range that once made him an MVP candidate, and the at-bats Wednesday carried a patience that was absent during the June power drought that served as the Braves' largest offensive drag.

Lane Thomas, acquired from Kansas City alongside left-hander Bailey Falter, hit a solo home run in the second inning. Mike Yastrzemski, his platoon partner in left field, came off the bench in the seventh and hit a solo shot of his own. The two of them combined for two home runs, two runs batted in, and the kind of complementary production that suggests the platoon Anthopoulos constructed is beginning to function as designed.

Drake Baldwin continued his quietly excellent season at the plate, going three for four with a run batted in. Ronald Acuna Jr. reached base three times -- two hits and a walk -- and drove in a run with a fifth-inning single. The Braves collected twelve hits as a team. When a lineup produces twelve hits, the bullpen's job becomes straightforward rather than heroic.

About that bullpen. Darius Dodd surrendered a Luis Robert Jr. solo home run in the seventh. Raisel Iglesias, whose post-June decline I have documented over the past three weeks, allowed a Bo Bichette solo shot in the ninth. Neither run altered the outcome, but the pattern from Iglesias is familiar: a hard-hit ball, a run that arrives too late to matter, and one more data point in a series that is beginning to complicate his October closing role.

The Braves are 72-48. They won this series against the Mets two games to one, which is what a first-place team should do against a division opponent with twenty fewer wins. Tuesday night it was Perez and a shutout. Wednesday night it was Mahle and seven strikeouts. Back-to-back games in which a non-Sale starter delivered the kind of outing that makes a playoff rotation deeper, not just longer.

I said yesterday that eighteen innings was not an accident. It is a trend. Tonight Mahle offered a different statistic in support of the same thesis: seven strikeouts, one earned run, ninety-three pitches, and an ERA that is quietly, methodically, declining.