Sometimes, in baseball, you get a good, old-fashioned walloping. That happens in Spring Training, too, and that’s what the Braves delivered unto the St. Louis Cardinals on Saturday afternoon.
The starting matchup for this one featured Julio Teheran and Miles Mikolas, and things were quiet in the first. Teheran got a double-play ball to erase his one-out walk, and Mikolas worked around a two-out double from Freddie Freeman. Teheran went 1-2-3 in the second, striking out two, and the Braves got some offense on the board. Nick Markakis hit a soft tapper and ended up on second base after Yadier Molina threw the ball away. With one out, a Preston Tucker single put runners at the corners, and Christian Colon then smacked a ball past the bleachers in left-center for a three-run dinger. Teheran then scatted two singles in the third while picking up another strikeout to finish his day while holding a three-run lead. He finished with three frames, zero runs, two hits, one walk, and three strikeouts.
The Braves tagged Mikolas for a fourth run in the bottom of the third, converting a well-placed soft fly by Freeman that went for a double when Nick Markakis singled him home with two outs. After that, the offenses went quiet. Shane Carle threw two scoreless frames for the Braves, while St. Louis relievers Matt Bowman and Luke Gregerson went six up, six down while striking out four Braves in a row at one point.
The Cardinals staged a two-out rally against Jason Hursh in the sixth, as a walk, a double, and a hard smash to left that went off of Rio Ruiz gave them two runs. Ruiz then extended the inning by misplaying a grounder, but Hursh got a groundout to staunch the bleeding. The Braves responded in more-than-sufficient manner in the bottom of the inning, putting the hurt on former Brave Jason Motte, who pitched semi-ineffectively in relief for Atlanta last year. Rob Brantly greeted Motte rudely with a homer, Xavier Avery and Lane Adams singled (the latter on a soft pop), and Preston Tucker smashed a ground-rule double to extend the lead to 6-2. That brought up Colon, whose two-run single extended his RBI tally on the day to five. Danny Santana’s two-out single ended up chasing Motte, and Ruiz capped the game’s scoring by singling home Colon.
The final three frames went relatively quietly after that. Jesse Biddle threw a scoreless inning and Josh Graham finished the game off with two goose eggs of his own, though he allowed three singles in the process.
Rob Brantly hit a double in the seventh, pushing him ahead of Colon with his sixth total base of the game. Freeman, Markakis, and Tucker also had multi-hit games. Curiously, the Braves collected zero walks despite the nine-run outburst. Dansby Swanson and Johan Camargo each went 0-for-3 with a strikeout at the top of the order.