While the All-Star break may not have been much of a break for first-time All-Star Drake Baldwin, the Braves catcher has certainly come out of the break refreshed.
Baldwin finished off a stellar first series back from the break with a career-high five hits — two more than he had ever had in a game — in Atlanta’s 8-5 win over the Texas Rangers at Truist Park Sunday afternoon which clinched a series victory.
Baldwin homered twice in the game and finished the series 10-for-14 (.714) with three homers and eight RBIs. He capped it off with the five-hit game for a Braves catcher since Johnny Estrada in 2004.
While Baldwin only had two RBIs in the series finale, Austin Riley picked up the slack in that regard with a breakthrough game at the plate, homering in his first two at-bats and giving the Braves some seventh-inning insurance with a two-run single up the middle.
It was his second multi-homer game of the season, with the first coming over three months ago on April 17. Riley’s four RBIs tied a season high and were nearly as many as the five RBIs he had in all of June.
In the early going of Sunday’s rubber match, the Braves seemed poised to potentially cruise but squandered the chance by scoring just a single run in each of the first four innings.
Michael Harris II made it 1-0 in the first, bringing home Baldwin after his leadoff single. Riley followed with solo homers in the second and fourth, sandwiched around Baldwin’s first homer in the third.
The Braves weren’t especially fooled by Rangers veteran starter Nathan Eovaldi, who was tagged for four runs on six hits (three homers) over four innings.
Those single-run innings seemed like they were going to loom large when Braves starter Grant Holmes ran into trouble in the fifth. After he coasted with relative ease through four scoreless innings, the Rangers put two runners on base with one out in the fifth.
Wyatt Langford got Texas on the board with an RBI double, Josh Jung brought in another with a sacrifice fly and Jake Burger cut the Braves’ lead to 4-3 with a two-out RBI single. But Holmes induced a groundout to third to strand the tying and go-ahead runs on base, finishing a five-inning outing with three runs allowed on seven hits, striking out and walking two apiece while improving to 6-4 on the season.
After their first two scoreless innings of the game in the fifth and sixth, the Braves broke through with three more in the seventh on Riley’s two-run single and an RBI double by Brewer Hicklen.
Baldwin capped off his career day with his second homer in the ninth.
All of that insurance provided a critical cushion when the Rangers tallied a run against Dylan Lee in the eighth on Kyle Higashioka’s RBI double and another off Raisel Iglesias in the ninth on a Wyatt Langford leadoff homer.
Iglesias bounced back, though, to retire the next three batters and finish the game off with minimal incident or stress, clinching the series and improving the Braves to 57-41 on the season.
They stay at home to begin next week without an off day, opening a four-game series against the Padres at Truist on Monday night.
