ATLANTA — The Braves closed a three-game set with the Mets the way first-place clubs prefer: with starting pitching, timely power, and a series win.
According to the Associated Press recap carried by CBS Sports, Tyler Mahle pitched six strong innings and fellow trade-deadline acquisition Lane Thomas homered as Atlanta beat New York 6-3 on Wednesday night at Truist Park. ESPN’s gamecast and box score match the final: Mets 3, Braves 6, with Atlanta improving to 73-48 and taking the series 2-1 after Tuesday’s 4-0 shutout.
AP’s account, as published on CBS Sports, notes that Mahle (4-9) earned his first win in his second start after arriving from San Francisco. He allowed one run on four hits over six innings with seven strikeouts. His only blemish was a home run by Mets catcher Luis Torrens. In two appearances with Atlanta, Mahle had allowed one run across 12 innings entering the night’s closeout work from the bullpen.
Thomas’s homer — his first since being traded to Atlanta from Kansas City — opened the scoring and put the Braves ahead 1-0 in the second, per the AP/CBS Sports writeup and ESPN’s scoring summary. ESPN’s play-by-play shows further Atlanta runs on a third-inning double-play grounder that scored Ronald Acuña Jr., an Acuña single that plated Austin Riley in the fifth, then a three-run seventh.
That seventh inning, AP reported, featured back-to-back home runs from Mike Yastrzemski and Riley. ESPN’s scoring log lists Yastrzemski’s blast making it 4-2 and Riley’s making it 5-2, with Drake Baldwin’s single driving in Acuña for a 6-2 cushion. Baldwin finished with three singles and an RBI in the AP account; Riley was 3-for-4 with two runs; Acuña had two hits, an RBI, and two runs.
New York’s offense came almost entirely via the long ball. ESPN’s summary has Torrens homering in the sixth, Luis Robert Jr. homering in the seventh off Dylan Dodd to cut the lead to 3-2 before Atlanta’s three-run reply, and Bo Bichette hitting a solo shot in the ninth off Raisel Iglesias. Dylan Lee worked a scoreless eighth in the AP recap before Iglesias closed it out despite the Bichette homer.
For a club sitting alone atop the NL East by a healthy margin in ESPN’s standings snapshot after the game, the series against a last-place Mets club was less about narrative drama than about banked wins. Still, the deadline arms and bats — Mahle and Thomas — produced the kind of night front offices buy for August and September.
Primary sources: CBS Sports box / AP recap; ESPN gamecast