Logan Henderson put together another great outing against one of the best offenses in baseball as the Brewers held the Braves to a single run for the second straight game. Small ball and Rake Bauers provided enough run support for Milwaukee to move to a league-leading 81-49.
Although he would eventually settle in, Henderson didn’t start the game on a positive note, walking Braves leadoff man Drake Baldwin to immediately put a runner on base. He bounced back to strike out Ronald Acuña Jr. on four pitches
and quickly got Matt Olson down 1-2 in the count, but Olson turned on a changeup below the zone and smoked it into right field for a single. Just three pitches later, Michael Harris II sent another changeup down the left-field line, scoring Baldwin and bringing Olson around to third.
With still only one out, runners on second and third, and Ozzie Albies coming to the plate, things briefly looked like they might get out of hand in a way that would have been largely uncharacteristic of Henderson. However, they didn’t. Henderson buckled down, retiring both Albies (on a pop-up to third base) and Mauricio Dubón (on a lineout to right field) to end the inning without allowing another run to score.
Jackson Chourio started the bottom of the first by working a walk off Braves starter Martín Pérez, but Pérez quickly struck out Brice Turang and got William Contreras to hit a soft pop-up that Olson ran down in foul territory. With two outs, Jake Bauers kept the inning alive, working a walk after an 11-pitch at-bat, but Andrew Vaughn also popped out to end the inning with the Brewers unable to answer.
While Milwaukee wasn’t able to break through in the first or second inning, they got on the board in the third. Pérez started the inning by getting Cooper Pratt to hit a soft grounder right back to him, but couldn’t field it, giving the Brewers a leadoff runner. Chourio couldn’t make solid contact either, hitting another weak grounder to Baldwin, who came out from behind the plate to throw him out at first. A second groundout from Turang advanced Pratt to third for Contreras, who grounded a single — the Brewers’ first hit of the inning — into left field to tie the game at one run apiece.
Up next was Jake Bauers, who somehow worked an even longer at-bat against Pérez this time in what’s probably the current front-runner for the Brewers’ best at-bat of the year. After working the count to 2-2, Bauers proceeded to foul off seven straight pitches, a stretch that included literally every pitch Pérez throws — sinker, four-seamer, curveball, changeup, and cutter. On the 12th pitch of the at-bat, Pérez went back to the four-seamer, and Bauers was finally sitting on something:
When Pérez exited the game after the fourth inning, he had thrown 97 pitches. 23 of those, or almost exactly a quarter of Pérez’s pitches in a nearly-100 pitch outing, were thrown to Jake Bauers. An incredible performance for Bauers, the Brewers’ OPS and home run leader, who both delivered the eventual winning run and was a massive part of getting Pérez out of the game early.
Bauers’ 23rd homer of the year made it 3-1, which was a lead that the Brewers wouldn’t relinquish, although they added an insurance run in the fourth with a Joey Ortiz double, a Luis Lara single, and a sac fly from Pratt. That run would be extraneous thanks to the dominance of the Brewers’ pitching staff, who held the Braves’ offense — which ranks close to the top of the league in most major offensive categories — to just five hits.
Henderson continues to look like a future star, bouncing back from that slightly nerve-wracking first inning to throw six steady innings of one-run ball and exit to resounding applause from the home crowd. He allowed just three more hits after the first and struck out four on the way to his eighth win of the season. Chad Patrick worked around a walk in a scoreless seventh and DL Hall struck out two in a 1-2-3 eighth. With Trevor Megill having pitched the previous two games, Aaron Ashby came in for a save opportunity and didn’t get off to a great start, allowing Albies and Dubón to single.
With two on and nobody out, Braves manager Walt Weiss opted to pinch-hit the right-handed Lane Thomas in favor of the left-handed Mike Yaztremski, but Ashby got him to fly out to left field for a huge first out. Neither runner tagged up and the next batter — Austin Riley — grounded into a 6-4-3 double play to end the game.
One final thing worth mentioning that Contreras appears to be breaking out of his slump in a big way, notching two hits: the RBI single and a double off the wall in left field. He now has six hits in two games this series.
Tomorrow’s series finale is set for much later than today’s, with first pitch scheduled for 6:10 p,m. Shane Drohan will go for the Brewers opposite righty Tyler Mahle of the Braves.
