Veteran Atlanta Braves left-hander Martin Perez will try to maintain his perfect record against the visiting New York Mets on Sunday afternoon when the teams play the third game of their wraparound four-game series.
The Braves have rediscovered their offense. Atlanta hit four homers in Friday’s 5-3 series opener and launched five home runs in Saturday’s 14-3 win.
Perez is 5-0 with a 2.94 ERA in 11 career appearances (seven starts) against the Mets. He beat them in New York on June 13, allowing one run in 5 1/3 innings.
New York right-hander Nolan McLean (5-5, 3.78 ERA) will be matched against Perez (6-5, 3.27).
Perez took a loss in his last start, a 5-3 home setback to St. Louis on Tuesday. He allowed four runs in five innings, all of them coming in one inning when he surrendered a pair of home runs, one of them a three-run shot.
“It was one pitch, really one pitch was three runs,” Atlanta manager Walt Weiss said. “Other that, like he always does, he kept us in the game and worked around some things.”
Since rejoining the starting rotation on May 19, Perez had made eight starts and gone 4-3 with a 4.17 ERA. He has allowed three or fewer runs in six of those appearances.
“It’s obviously a long season and there’s going to be highs and lows,” Perez said. “One of the things this team can focus on is trying to get that momentum swung back this way.”
McLean is coming off a six-inning scoreless effort at Toronto on Tuesday, when he allowed five hits and two walks while striking out seven. It was a nice rebound from his previous start against the Chicago Cubs, when he was tagged for six runs in six innings.
“That’s who he is,” interim Mets manager Andy Green said on Tuesday. “It’s been fun seeing him kind of bounce back from a tougher stretch. I know last game, a little bit was made out of like a couple of home runs that skewed the line, but (today) he was just mixing his pitches incredibly well.”
McLean has made two career starts against Atlanta, going 1-0 with a 3.27 ERA. He started against the Braves on June 12 in New York and did not receive a decision, allowing two runs in four innings.
“He’s got different ways to end at-bats,” Green said. “He was competitive the whole day, he was in the zone the whole day and that was, start to finish, as just clean and dominant as he’s been all year, so it was awesome.”
The Atlanta offense has come to life and scored at least five runs in each of the last four games, three of them wins. Austin Riley hit a three-run homer on Saturday to end a 36-game homerless streak; his last homer had been May 20 at Miami.
A bright spot for the Mets continues to be Carson Benge. He singled on Saturday and has hit safely in nine straight and reached base safely in 16 consecutive games. Shortstop Francisco Lindor was back in the leadoff spot and had two hits.
–Field Level Media
