Chris Sale looks to bring Atlanta Braves back to life against Diamondbacks

It’s June 4 and the Atlanta Braves are currently five games under .500, have lost seven of their last ten ballgames and are stuck in fourth place in the NL East at the moment. Needless to say, things are going in the wrong direction for Atlanta at the moment and there’s no better a time than right now to hopefully get things turned around. The Braves are set to face off against the Diamondbacks as they look to avoid suffering yet another series loss.

The good news for the Braves heading into this one is that they couldn’t have asked for a better starter to be going for them tonight than Chris Sale. Sale has been on a bit of a roll lately, as his past three starts have gone pretty well. He’s thrown 20 innings over his past three starts and has only given up two runs on 11 hits and six walks. Outside of that, he’s struck out 22 batters.

As a result of this performance, Sale is down to a 3.06 ERA (75 ERA-) and a 2.98 FIP (78 FIP-). While those numbers still aren’t as good as they were during his awesome season last year, they’re getting pretty close and it’s apparent that as long as Sale is healthy, he can be counted on to eventually get right and start tearing through his opposing hitters. Sale will be heading into this start looking to build upon what he did against the Diamondbacks back on April 25 — that was when Sale went five innings and gave up five hits and walked two batters but also managed to only give up one run in the process. It wasn’t a great performance but hopefully things will be better in Sale’s second go-around against Arizona.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s going to be hoping that Merill Kelly will be able to give them something. He’s had a pretty rough go of it over his past couple of starts — he gave up four runs over six innings against the Cardinals on May 24 and then followed that up by giving up six runs (four earned) against the Nationals over just five innings. With that being said, those two starts followed a great effort on May 18 where he threw seven shutout innings while striking out 11 batters in the process. Did this happen to occur against the Rockies? Yeah. Are the Rockies still a big league ballclub? That’s also true, which is why you can’t take it away from Kelly that his best start just happened to come against a team that might wind up being one of the worst to ever play big league baseball.

He also has a track record of doing pretty well against the Braves earlier this season. Back on April 26, Kelly pitched six solid innings where he only gave up two runs in the process. That game ended up getting away from Arizona once Kelly left the game but while he was out there, the Braves were largely stifled. You could argue that the Braves as a whole have been “largely stifled” for most of this season, so it’s entirely possible that Merrill Kelly could continue to give the Braves fits.

The obvious hope is that the Braves will be able to repeat whatever the Cardinals and Nationals were able to do against him in his most recent outings. Maybe we’ll see Austin Riley continue to find success against Kelly going forward? Riley has four hits in 12 at-bats against Kelly, including a homer and two doubles. He also has four strikeouts, so it appears to be a bit of a boom-or-bust matchup here — hopefully we’ll see Riley continue to come out on top in this particular matchup.

The Braves are coming off of a contest where they looked largely uninspired and frustrated. It’s definitely been a bummer to see this team slide back down to being a few games under .500 after it seemed like they had crossed that hurdle for the only time. They’ve got some work to do to get back to that mark and now they’ll be hoping that their star hurler will be able to get the best of an Arizona team that’s trying to get out of a hole, themselves.