After winning the battle of the aces on Friday to kick off this huge division rival series, the Braves had a Martin Perez vs Zack Wheeler matchup to contend with tonight.
Things started inauspiciously for Atlanta, as two singles and a walk from their first three batters of the game turned into zero runs in the first, followed immediately by four walks and a single allowed by Perez in the bottom of the inning to put the Braves in a 3-0 hole going into the second inning. Ronald pulled one back for the Braves in the third
with a monster solo homer on a sweeper that wasn’t in an awful location from Wheeler. That was also Ronald’s 500th career RBI, which he picked up in style.
Perez allowed a solo homer to Schwarber, giving back the run in the fourth and allowed two more singles but Ray Kerr stranded those two Phillies to maintain the 4-1 deficit. That’s only 3.2 innings and 4 largely deserved runs allowed for Perez in a pretty rough outing for the veteran. Kerr stabilized the game and a big solo homer from Austin brought another run back in the seventh, making it a 4-2 game.
Kerr ended his outing with a big 3.1 scoreless innings with only the one strikeout but no walks and 5 whiffs on 35 pitches. Brent Suter worked a scoreless eighth, despite a single and a walk, giving the offense once last chance to overcome a two run deficit in the ninth. They went down in order to Jhoan Duran, handing the Phillies a 4-2 win to even the series.
While the offense didn’t do enough to win this game, despite some bad sequencing luck to only get 2 runs from 2 mammoth homers, Perez’ command meltdown gave the Phillies a lead that they would never relinquish.
We’ll be back tomorrow at 1:10 PM ET for game 3 of this 4-game wrap-around series.
