The Braves spent June looking a lot like they did in Sunday’s 5-3 loss to the Cardinals: enough traffic to suggest something might happen, not enough punch to actually finish the job.
Atlanta put the tying run on second in the eighth inning and loaded the bases at one point, but the only run it scratched across in that frame came on a wild pitch. That pretty much summed up the night. The Braves had chances, they drew walks, they got on base, and they still never delivered the swing that would flip the game.
Matthew Liberatore wasn’t exactly sharp, but he was good enough to survive. The Braves had the leadoff man aboard in every inning from the second through the sixth, yet managed only one run in that stretch.
That one came after a steal, a wild pitch, and a sacrifice fly. Liberatore finished with four walks and a hit-by-pitch in five innings, but he also struck out nine, and Atlanta kept giving away at-bats.
The second inning was a perfect snapshot. Liberatore walked two to open the frame, then struck out the side.
Austin Riley chased a hanging slider with one out, and Joey Bart took two strikes before going down to end it. In the third, Matt Olson fell behind 0-2 after taking two hittable fastballs, then whiffed at a hanging curve for strike three.
The zone was there for the taking, but the Braves never really attacked it with conviction.
Martin Perez gave the Cardinals the opening they needed. He worked through three scoreless innings before Nelson Velazquez tied it with a home run on a 3-2 cutter right down the middle, and Nathan Church followed later in the inning with a three-run homer. Perez allowed just one strikeout over five innings, and his 1/3 K/BB ratio helped make the night feel out of reach, especially for a Braves offense that has hit multiple homers only four times in June.
Atlanta’s first run came in the same familiar way as several of its best moments in the game: walk, steal, wild pitch, sacrifice fly. That formula showed up again in the seventh, when the Braves pushed across a second run with a two-out rally.
A walk started it, Drake Baldwin followed with a bloop single for his first hit in about two weeks, and Ozzie Albies lined one into the middle of the field. Olson had a chance to do more damage, but he fouled off two pitches and then grounded out weakly on a 2-2 pitch that came in on his hands.
The eighth inning gave Atlanta its best shot. Mauricio Dubon singled, Mike Yastrzemski added an infield hit, and the Braves kept the line moving.
Then Riley had the kind of plate appearance that fit the entire month: he took a pitch over the middle that should have been driven, later swung at a pitch in the dirt, and then struck out looking at another fastball in the zone. After that, Rowdy Tellez and Dominic Smith came off the bench and drew back-to-back walks, with a wild pitch to Tellez bringing home Atlanta’s third run.
Baldwin kept the inning alive with a fight, but he couldn’t do anything meaningful with a fastball on the low-and-inside corner and rolled out to second.
The Braves still had one last chance when Olson led off the ninth with a double off a sinker he could finally square up. But the rest of the inning went nowhere, with the next three batters each putting weak grounders in play. The first two came on very hittable pitches, which only sharpened the bigger issue: Atlanta has drifted away from the aggressive, hard-contact approach it showed in April and May.
Dylan Dodd, Ian Hamilton, and Raisel Iglesias, who got some work in, covered the rest of the game after James Karichak’s leadoff walk turned into a run in the same way Atlanta had scored its first one. But the bullpen’s effort didn’t change the result. Until the Braves start swinging early and doing real damage again, nights like this are going to keep showing up.
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