Six Hits Each

Both teams had six hits.

That is the entire game, if you want it in one line, and it is the kind of line that makes baseball worth the trouble of watching a hundred and sixty-two to get here. Atlanta 6, Philadelphia 2. Philadelphia's season is over and Atlanta is going to Los Angeles. Six hits apiece. Three of Atlanta's cleared the fence. None of Philadelphia's did.

Everything else is commentary.

The thing I got right, and the way I got it wrong

On Wednesday night I wrote that Atlanta lost Game 2 because it cannot hit home runs.

I want to be precise about that sentence, because tonight it looks prophetic and it does not entirely deserve to.

What was true: Atlanta had hit exactly one home run in the first nineteen innings of this series, and Philadelphia hit three in the only game it won. In a best-of-three, that gap was the series.

What was not true is the thing my sentence implied — that this is a team without the ability. Atlanta hit 204 home runs this season. That is eighth in baseball, and twenty-two more than Philadelphia hit. The club that out-homered Atlanta 3-0 on Wednesday finished the regular season sixteenth in the league in the exact category it beat Atlanta with.

So the honest version of Wednesday's sentence is narrower than the one I published. Atlanta had not lost the ability to hit home runs. It had stopped. There is a difference between a team that cannot do a thing and a team that has not done it lately, and the width of that difference is about four days.

Tonight it started again, and then it did nothing else. Michael Harris II hit a three-run home run in the first inning off Aaron Nola, who recorded five outs and was gone. Ozzie Albies hit a two-run home run in the fourth. Matt Olson hit a solo home run in the seventh. Three swings, six runs. Atlanta's other three hits produced nothing at all.

Six runs on six hits is not an efficient offense. It is a narrow one. Atlanta also drew five walks, and left the rest of the evening to three men who found the right angle.

Nine appearances

Now the part I would like graded more strictly.

Thursday morning I wrote that the six arms Atlanta had not used were the staff's strength and not its leftovers.

Walt Weiss opened an elimination game with Ray Kerr, who had pitched nine times all season. Nine. Eighteen and a third innings, tucked into whatever corners of the schedule Atlanta could find for him, behind a 1.47 ERA that rests on so little work it should not persuade anybody of anything. He gave Atlanta three and a third innings and allowed one hit.

Behind him came Grant Holmes — who made thirty-one appearances and threw 151.2 innings as a starter this season — out of the bullpen, for two. Holmes is the winning pitcher in a winner-take-all game he did not start. Then Robert Suarez, for two outs.

Four pitchers in, Atlanta had used four men who had not thrown a pitch in this series, and they had covered six and two-thirds of the nine innings it needed.

That is the part of my sentence that held.

Here is the part that did not. Atlanta did not finish the game with those arms. Didier Fuentes pitched the eighth on his third consecutive day of work — Game 1, Game 2, Game 3, all of them. And then Chris Sale, who started Game 1 on Tuesday and threw ninety-five pitches doing it, came out of the bullpen on two days of rest and struck out three in an inning and a third.

Weiss had two men left who had not appeared in this series at all. Brent Suter and Victor Mederos were available and never used. He reached past both of them for a pitcher who had started forty-eight hours earlier.

I think he was right. I also think it means my sentence was describing a bullpen while the ending was decided by a starter, and those are not the same claim. The unused arms were two-thirds of this. The last third was the oldest idea in October: give the ball to your best pitcher and stop being clever.

What I said this morning

There is one more thing on the record, and it is the least comfortable one.

In May I wrote that this might be the most resilient team in franchise history. On Thursday morning I wrote that the sentence was mine and that it did not reach tonight.

It reached.

A team that led Game 2 by two runs after seven, lost it in extra innings, and came back the following night to win an elimination game on six hits has earned the word I spent the morning taking back from it. I was too careful. The cost of that caution was a day of underrating a club for reasons that were about me rather than about Atlanta, and I would rather be wrong in that direction than the other one.

Saturday

Baseball has a long memory, and it is about to go looking through this one.

Atlanta won ninety-four games and the National League East. It won the division by six games over the team that just took it to a third game and a ninth inning. On Saturday afternoon it will be at Dodger Stadium against a club that won a hundred, in a five-game series that starts at four o'clock Eastern, with Atlanta on the road for the first two and one day off between tonight and then.

The arithmetic of what Atlanta spent to get there is not complicated. Six pitchers for nine innings. Fuentes has worked three straight days. Sale has thrown a hundred and sixteen pitches since Tuesday afternoon. Kerr threw forty-seven pitches and three and a third innings tonight, against a season that averaged a shade over two innings an appearance.

There is a version of this season where none of that matters, because one day is enough, the rotation resets, and tonight's three home runs were the beginning of something rather than a visit.

There is also a version where tonight was the last of what this team had.

The numbers will not tell you which, not yet, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you certainty at October prices. What they will tell you is this: a team that scores six runs on six hits in an elimination game has not solved anything. It got exactly what it needed, on the one night it had to have it. In October that is the only sort of answer anybody is given.