Wheels come off
Thomson sticks with starter, maybe one batter too long, as Braves get back on track
In his second postseason as a big-league boss, Rob Thomson may be short on managerial experience, but he’s long on baseball knowledge. With it, he could see an opportunity forming.
The Phillies would travel for the first two games of the National League Division Series over a long weekend in Atlanta. They’d have to tangle with one of the most prolific slugging offenses in baseball history, attached to a 104-win team suddenly short of starting pitching.
The plan would be risky but assertive. Attack Spencer Strider, the only non-question mark in the Braves’ rotation. With Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola waiting in Games 2 and 3, the Phillies would have the advantage each night. If they could go into those games leading the series 1-0 . . . . well, there’s your best-of-5.
So Thomson would run an aggressive Game 1. He instructed Phillies to take extra bases at a record clip. He would remove a perfectly effective starter after 11 outs and a 1-0 lead. He’d make the most of a nonsensical extra off day to pepper the Braves with one fresh reliever after another — velocity, velocity and more velocity — to subdue a lineup no one had been able to in 2023.
One after another, he swarmed Braves hitters with high-leverage relievers like Phillies fans descending on Blooper’s Twitter mentions.
And then Monday, with a chance to double the advantage, he did the opposite. Dominant for six innings, Thomson bet on Wheeler dominating for a seventh. It worked until his 92nd and final delivery hung into the zone for Travis d’Arnaud to club into the stands in left.
That wasn’t the decisive blow, which would wait until Jeff Hoffman and Austin Riley collided in a fateful eighth. But in two games, Thomson has lived the
extremes of postseason managerial life.
“I get it,” Thomson was saying after Game 1. “If that didn’t work out, it would be scrutinized. But it is what it is, and you’ve got to make the best decision in your mind that you need to make.”
So far, Thomson is 1-and1. Hence the Phillies and the Braves are tied at 1 in their series, which shifts Wednesday to Philadelphia after the Braves’ 5-4 rally in Game 2.
Whatever you may think of the matchups, one seems clear. The Phillies lineup as currently constructed is far better than the Braves’ pitching staff. That’s a staff without Charlie Morton, without Kyle Wright, with Max Fried coming off the injured list with a finger blister and an 18-day gap between starts, with a closer who shudders at the sight of Bryce Harper, with two or three serious questions as to who would fill out the bullpen, with a genuine quandary as to who will get the ball in Game 3.
Hence 15 hits in two games. Though the Phillies have let the Braves off the hook with 18 men left on base and 4-for-16 with runners in scoring position, the bats have gotten them in position to score and win.
That’s not an advantage a manager can impact much, short of telling his guys to go out there and do what has gotten them there. But keeping Atlanta’s bats off balance was a lever Thomson could push. And double-digit innings into the series without scoring, he inflicted on the Braves the same pernicious optical illusion that the Phillies felt last year in the World Series against Houston — of how one run can start to look like so much more, how three runs might as well be a mountain.
That pressure is why Thompson summoned Hoffman in the fourth inning of Game 1 with his team up 1-0, even as Ranger Suarez had been doing just fine, allowing one hit over 13 batters faced and 53 pitches.
“Really (we) didn’t have a script, but you know, just going to read the situation, and how Ranger was,” Thomson said of what became a 3-0 win. “I thought Ranger was really good. Just thought right there on (Marcell) Ozuna that we’d stopped the momentum.”
But faced with a similar choice — with all the same arms available, with the same day off looming ahead of two games at Citizens Bank Park — he didn’t press the same button.
It’s as easy to understand what Thomson saw Monday. Wheeler had stretched the Braves’ scoreless streak to 14 innings, the most ever for a 100-win team to start a postseason. It took 51 pitches for the Braves, they of 307 regular-season home runs, to put a ball in play against him. Through six innings, the Braves managed more Trea Turner errors (two) than hits, resulting in a scratched together, unearned run.
But the plan didn’t work out Monday as it had Saturday. It didn’t include a hung slurve, 81 mph and dead red, to d’Arnaud. It didn’t involve Hoffman being forced to a full count by Riley, the third baseman getting just enough of a slider to one-handedly will it over the wall, just the second home run Hoffman has allowed since the middle of July.
Thomson warned, for all the warm-and-fuzzies after Game 1, of the “swing game” of Game 2. He may not have heeded his own warning.
“You can’t let up at all against this ballclub because they’re good, and they can attack, and they can do a lot of good things,” Thomson said. “So we’ve got to stay nose to the grindstone.”
It’ll be up to Thomson to help swing it back.