The Atlanta Braves spoiled a historic start from Grant Holmes, dropping the series finale to the Colorado Rockies, 10-1. Manager Brian Snitker barely said much about it when asked after the game. He was ready to get into how nearly nothing went right.
“I felt pretty good about putting runs on the board today.” he said. “A guy coming off rehab and all. Didn’t know how long he would go. I thought, hopefully, we do enough damage to get to the bullpen early. It just didn’t happen.
Rockies starting pitcher Austin Gomber gave his team five scoreless innings, allowing just two hits in his season debut. He coming off recovery from a shoulder injury, pitching for a team that is infamous for the low quality of its pitching, and shut down the Braves. This team at times gives pitchers the timely good outing they’ve been looking for.
Snitker remains frustrated by the season-long dilemma of getting a run going, especially at the plate. As soon as you think it’s about to happen, that’s proven wrong.
“We’ve talked about this: sustaining a drive with the offense. We’re just having a hard time doing that. We’ve had a couple games up until today, four out of five were really good. We’re starting to click here and get this thing rolling, and we just can’t get off the matt and put anything together for an extended period of time, and we haven’t all year.”
In those four games he alluded to, the Braves scored seven, six, 12 and four runs in the those games. In the two losses in their last six, they scored just one.
Snitker didn’t have any answers. Let’s be frank, if he had them, the Braves would have turned things around by now. At this point, he feels like all they can do is wait until that consistency arrives.
“It’s sounds like a broken record. They’ve done it before. They’re capable. We all know that, but we have to do it.
Even though they won another series, there was still a feeling that the job wasn’t finished. He expected to win the game, and it didn’t happen. Even with the disastrous performance by the bullpen to give up seven runs, Snitker couldn’t stop revisiting the weak offensive performance. He felt things could have gone differently, perhaps even later in the game, if they had been able to give Holmes and the rest of the staff run support.
“I thought we were gonna score runs. We didn’t score runs. If we had scored runs who knows what would’ve happened after we bring in the bullpen.”
It would have been a different situation. Perhaps the Rockies bats get different results because of that. Instead, that moment for the Mets series that Snitker was looking for stopped in its tracks.
