The Path Closed on Its First Night

This morning the path to a first-round bye was narrow, but it was a path, and it was short enough to state in one sentence: Atlanta wins four, Los Angeles loses four, both clubs finish 97-65, and Atlanta takes the second seed on a season series it won five games to one.

Atlanta lost the first of the four.

That is the whole of Thursday night. Everything else — the twelve hits, the four-run first inning, the single run of margin — is decoration on it. Cincinnati won 7-6 at Truist Park. The Reds are 74-85. The Braves are 93-66 with three games left in Miami, which puts their ceiling at ninety-six wins, and Los Angeles cannot now finish below ninety-seven. The arithmetic is not close and it does not reverse. Atlanta is the third seed. It will host all three Wild Card games at Truist Park beginning Tuesday, and Milwaukee and Los Angeles will spend that week not playing.

Notice the shape of it. Atlanta did not lose the bye on a tiebreaker. Atlanta held the tiebreaker — five games to one over the Dodgers, three of those wins by a single run at Truist Park in August — and it never came up, because a tie requires two clubs to arrive at the same number, and Atlanta can no longer arrive. There is a version of this season where those six games are the most valuable thing Atlanta owns in September. This is not that version. The season series was the right key for a lock that got changed.

By the Numbers: the distance between twelve hits and a win.

Atlanta's first inning ran five hits, two walks and four runs, and ended with the bases loaded. Drake Baldwin opened the game with a single and closed the inning, two outs later and the bases full, flying out sharply to center fielder Carlos Jorge. In the fifth, bases full again, he lined out sharply to Carlos Jorge. Baldwin finished with six men left on base, more than anyone else on the club, and he ended neither inning weakly. The ball was struck well both times, to the same man.

Jorge earns his own paragraph. He homered to open the game, recorded eleven putouts, and caught the final out of Atlanta's regular season at Truist Park. The Braves hit the ball hard, repeatedly, into the one patch of grass where Cincinnati had somebody standing. Ten Atlanta runners were left on base; Cincinnati left two. This is, statistically speaking, not ideal.

The loss itself took one swing. AJ Smith-Shawver entered the sixth with a 6-5 lead and gave up exactly one hit in two innings of work. The hit was Héctor Rodríguez's two-run home run to right field, with Eugenio Suárez aboard by way of a hit batsman. Smith-Shawver retired three of the five men he faced that inning. The other two were the game.

Which is the night's real accounting. Atlanta out-hit Cincinnati twelve to seven and lost by one run, because three of Cincinnati's seven hits left the ballpark and all three of them went to right field — Jorge's leadoff shot, Elly De La Cruz's thirtieth in the third, Rodríguez's sixth in the sixth. Tyler Mahle allowed two of them and five earned runs across five innings, his worst turn since joining Atlanta, in his last start of the regular season, five days before a Wild Card round. One start is not a forecast. It is the most recent evidence, and Atlanta has five days to decide how much of it to believe.

One line worth keeping. Austin Riley hit his nineteenth home run, drew a walk, drove in two, and did not strike out. Yesterday this outlet put his strikeout total at a hundred and ninety-five, the highest of his career. Tonight it is still a hundred and ninety-five. A number that stops moving is a small thing in a bad season, and small things are what a bad season leaves you to read.

The Braves clinched the National League East and then spent the closing week of the schedule learning the difference between clinching and seeding. Those are not the same accomplishment and they were never going to feel the same. Tuesday it hosts a best-of-three against a club not yet determined, with the crowd and the pitching order arranged the way it wanted them. What it does not have is the week off the two teams above it earned, and it does not have that because of a Thursday in September against a club eleven games under .500.

Baseball has a long memory. It also keeps a short ledger, and only one line was ruled off tonight — the one Atlanta wrote itself this morning.