Well, That Sucked: 2026 Atlanta Braves Lose NLDS, Again

Michael Harris II pats his chest after a run scoring double in Game Two. It turned out to be the offensive highlight of the series for the Braves.

[Read about the 2026 Braves season.]

[Read about winning the Wild-Card Series.]

The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Atlanta Braves 3 games to 1 in the NLDS. We came home from LA with a split, our two best starters rested, and a real chance to win this series. Then we scored two runs in two games at home. Pitiful. 

The wimpy 2022 and 2023  postseason bats still haunt me. Eight runs in four games. 18 hits. One hit in 23 at-bats with runners in scoring position. My WinZone charts spent the season showing how hard it is to win when you score three runs or less. We decided to spend the entire Division Series in that column. We won once. What did we expect?

I was feeling pretty good after Game Two. Cocky, even. Nobody seemed to think we could beat LA, but we had just split two games out there without starting Sale or Mahle. We have traditionally had a miserable time winning in that ballpark. Coming home even felt like something. It was something. We just didn't do much with it.

Game One went to the freshest arms, the guys who had thrown the fewest pitches getting us past Philadelphia. Dodd gave us three scoreless innings. Mederos and A. J. Smith-Shawver gave up the damaging homers. Sean Murphy hit one for us. Albies hit a 2-run homer late. We lost 5 – 3.

Murphy's homer came in the 6^th and made it a 2 – 1 game. Then two walks gave Olson an opportunity to change the game. He didn't. Weiss kept resting the pitchers he would normally call upon to protect a lead. He caught some flak for that. A lot of fans thought he should have gone to those guys anyway. Keep it close.

But Weiss was thinking of the series as a whole. We needed our best bullpen arms fresh. The Dodgers ended up scoring four more runs against our “B-list” bullpen. Had we held them and Albies hit that homer in the ninth we might have won 3 – 2.

Woulda coulda shoulda.

Then came the announcement that Sale would not start Game Two. A third consecutive bullpen game in the postseason, counting the clincher against the Phillies. Oh, no! Not again! We had just lost the opener, and now we were asking the “A-list” bullpen to keep us from coming home down 0 – 2 for the series.

But Ray Kerr, the guy from nowhere, came in and handled his part of the deal, 2⅔ scoreless innings, 4 Ks, and got Shohei Ohtani twice. After his surprise start against Philadelphia, he was our October celebrity. Two postseason starts for a guy I had barely thought about before the playoffs. We could have used someone like him swinging a bat.

Holmes didn’t look great. He couldn't give us much length, and Weiss had to keep moving. Lee got us out of trouble in the fourth, then put two aboard with nobody out in the fifth. Robert Suárez came in and got three consecutive outs, throwing 100-plus heat. Those were three huge outs. He had been sensational before his mid-season injury and hadn't looked that sharp since returning. I wondered whether they would even include him on the roster. Luckily they did and he rose to the occasion.

We still needed twelve outs. Fuentes got eleven. It was his longest outing of the season. He retired the first eleven men he faced, mixing his slider and splitter with that ridiculous fastball. After his painful moments against Philadelphia, this was quite a response for the 21-year-old. Max Muncy homered with two outs in the ninth. Credit to him. Iggy came in and got the last out. We won 3 - 2.

Harris supplied the offense we absolutely had to have. A triple (scoring later on a wild-pitch), a critical 2-run double, three hits overall. We also walked eight times. None of those walks scored. In what became the theme for the series for the Braves, a lot of action produced very little. We simply did not take what the Dodger pitching gave us. Still, Harris gave our pitching enough. We had our split.

The Sale controversy continued. Should he have closed against Philadelphia with a 4-run lead? Did that appearance cost us a start in LA? I had enjoyed seeing him come out of the bullpen as much as anybody. But Weiss had alternatives. Whatever. With only two starters we could really count on, coming home even with both rested was the best setup I could ask for. Losing afterward doesn't change that.

Before Game Three I told Jerry if we gave Sale a real lead, two runs or more, he would hold it. He's human. He could allow a couple of runs and still be Chris Sale with something to protect. Get him an early lead, let him carry us deep into the game. Best rest the bullpen could have.

But Yoshinobu Yamamoto was outstanding. Seven innings, 10 Ks, one run allowed. Sale worked through trouble early, with Dubón robbing former Brave Freddie Freeman of a homer in the third. Then Kiké Hernández hit a two-run homer in the fourth and Freeman hit another that stayed beyond Dubón's reach. Sale allowed three runs in five innings. The bullpen gave us four scoreless innings after that.

The bottom of the fifth hurt most. Two singles and a walk loaded the bases with one out. Baldwin's groundout scored a run. Acuña grounded out to end it. That was our chance to make this a ballgame again. We got one run. Albies led off the ninth with a double and never came home either. We lost 3 – 1. Sale never got the lead I was hoping for. With runners in scoring position, I might as well have been hitting for the Braves. They were no better.

Game Four was do or die, of course. Jerry reminded me how we tended to rise to the occasion all season. I never doubted Mahle would do his part. He went 6⅓ innings, allowed three hits and one earned run. Harris manufactured our first-inning run with a single, a steal, Olson moving him over and a wild pitch. For a moment we had exactly what I wanted. An early lead.

Then, just when we could least afford it, we botched the ball defensively. Errors put the Dodgers back up in the second. This wasn’t fun. This was a nightmare gaining momentum. Still, Mahle kept pitching. Dodger pitching walked five of our guys. None scored. Albies doubled to start the sixth. Nobody brought him home. Hopeless dread was becoming a reality, which, oddly enough, is easier for me to handle.

In the seventh, Fuentes walked two and Suárez gave up the two-run single to Andy Pages. After everything our bullpen had done all season, we were looking cooked. The Dodgers only had five hits all night. Unlike us, the reigning back-to-back World Series Champions did not waste them. Which is what separates the champs from the rest. Muncy added another homer in the ninth. We lost 4 – 1. It wasn’t that close really.

Harris had two of our three hits. He doubled in the seventh, and Acuña grounded out on the first pitch. Ronald heard boos in his final AB. Afterward he said the fans had every right to boo him. He was emotional. He knew what we needed from him, and he knew he hadn't delivered. Not even a little bit. Two hits in fifteen at-bats against LA. But he had plenty of company in that failure. Harris needed help from somewhere. Albies did what he could. Everybody else in our lineup basically sucked.

You have to hand it to the Dodgers. Their expensive collection of talent showed up against Atlanta. Tarik Skubal, Blake Snell, Yamamoto, then another difficult pitcher out of the bullpen. Then another. Even when we got a starter out of the game, their pen delivered a quality outing. We might have beat ourselves with our offensive impotence but the Dodgers out-played us too.

The season formula of homers with runners aboard and enough pitching to make it hold did not materialize. We looked and felt like a different team. We got two homers in Game One. None in the next three. We scored two runs in eighteen innings at home. All that pitching, all those chances, and two runs. It is hard to find a managing decision that fixes that.

The Braves were 1 for 23 with runners in scoring position against LA in this series. That is my definition of torture and it was really there all year long. Which is why I had such a fretful 94-win season.

Acuña, Olson, Baldwin, and, of course, Riley, all sucked at the plate in the NLDS. Dodger pitching owned those guys. No, I’m not having fun. I’m not enjoying any of this. I enjoyed beating the Phillies for a little moment, and thought, why is that even a thing? Atlanta beat Philadelphia in the postseason like that’s a thing, because it is/was a thing. So what? Gratitude is a poor substitute for losing. We lost, like almost every team in all of baseball loses every season. I know it’s not easy. I’m 60 years a Braves fan. We’ve been to the NLCS a bunch. We won two World Series Championships. Now I’m supposed to be grateful for what just happened?

Okay, I’ll be grateful because that’s always the healthy thing to do. I got to enjoy watching my home team play into October, like Jerry said. Not very far but we played into October. The 94 wins, the division title, beating the Phillies in the postseason all definitely count as awesome. Kerr was magic from nowhere this postseason. Fuentes had a sensational season and a good postseason in his rookie year. Both of them gave us a wonderful Game Two in LA. Sale coming out of the bullpen against the Phillies was another mythic-moment I will remember. There was a lot to be grateful for before the ride stopped.

Gratitude is a poor salve for losing. Especially the way we lost. I can’t even say we fought hard. Our bullpen sure as hell did. Jerry said to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. I tried. I even got cocky for a day.

The toughest part is knowing how hard it is/was to get to where we got only to come up empty. No one wants a Wild-Card Series winner T-shirt. They don’t even make those as far as I can tell. No one gives a rip about winning that series. It is an empty victory born of the need of additional MLB revenue. Let’s give more fans in more cities some reason to cheer. The NLDS is a real play-off series. We failed.

There are no T-shirts for winning 90+ games either. That’s baseball. No sport is more demanding on a fan. 162 games of struggle. April and May were amazing. June was agony. After that it was a see-saw of emotions. And then you lose. It isn’t just the end of the season. It’s almost like a death in the family.

Over six-months of game after game and now I am left with the void of no baseball. No box scores to check tomorrow morning. No WinZone stats to consider. That’s actually the worst part, the part I always hate whether we win the division or have a losing season. What do I do with all that time I devoted to studying and watching and listening to baseball?

Am I taking it too hard? Yeah, today I probably am. We’ll get ‘em next season is a resilient message. It also isn’t true for most teams. Only 8 teams make it to the Division Series each year. As a Braves fan I have to hang on to 7 division wins in the last 9 seasons. And, of course, that time we won 14 divisions in a row. Plenty of teams would kill for that kind of success. That’s something. It also, for whatever reason, doesn’t help right now.