4 takeaways from Braves’ sweep of Dodgers include Atlanta’s Chris Sale flexing and L.A.’s continued tinkering of rotation
Until Atlanta’s uncharacteristic down season in 2025, the Braves and Dodgers enjoyed a lengthy parallel run as the gold standards atop the National League. From 2018-2024, they racked up more regular-season wins than any other NL team by a healthy margin and made annual trips to the postseason. During that run, they met three times in October. The Dodgers toppled the Braves in the 2018 NLDS en route to the pennant. In 2020, L.A. again emerged victorious over Atlanta in the NLCS in seven games on their path to claiming the franchise’s first title since 1988. The Braves returned the favor a year later, eliminating the Dodgers in the NLCS on their own march to a long-awaited World Series title.
Since then, however, clashes between the two powerhouses have been limited to the regular season. That could change this year. Atlanta’s resurgence has restored a familiar picture atop the National League standings, with both the Braves and Dodgers jockeying with the Brewers for the top overall seed and the two byes surpassing the wild-card round. A potential preview of another epic postseason showdown unfolded this week at Truist Park, with the Braves sweeping the Dodgers, winning all three games by one run apiece. Right-hander Bryce Elder turned in a quality start before Ozzie Albies drove in the go-ahead run in the eighth inning as Atlanta took the series opener 4-3. Another back-and-forth nailbiter ensued Wednesday that also fell in the Braves’ favor, this time in walk-off fashion, 6-5. The series concluded Thursday with a gem of a pitchers’ duel between Chris Sale and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Sale stole the show by throwing a spectacular complete game shutout to preserve a 1-0 victory — with the lone run coming on Drake Baldwin’s solo homer on Yamamoto’s first pitch of the game — and nail down the sweep for the Braves.
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Here are four takeaways from this week’s marquee matchup in Atlanta:
Sheesh, Chris Sale
If you needed any additional evidence that this week’s series had a little extra juice, look no further than 37-year-old Chris Sale unleashing his hardest recorded pitch in more than eight years: a 100.1-mph heater to Shohei Ohtani in the top of the third inning that Ohtani fouled off before succumbing to Sale’s signature slider a couple pitches later.
Two innings later, Sale again brought some bonus heat against Ohtani, this time 99.6 mph — also harder than any other pitch he had thrown as a Brave before Thursday — that blazed past Ohtani’s vicious hack above the zone for his second strikeout of the night. These were just two of Sale’s 11 punchouts in the outing, a complete-game masterclass on 109 pitches that featured five hits and zero walks. It was Sale’s first complete game since June 5, 2019.
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Watching Sale rise to the occasion Thursday to help Atlanta complete the sweep, outpitching another ace in Yamamoto along the way, evoked an aura of October that was difficult to deny. But that postseason-like buzz Sale and the Braves built in front of nearly 40,000 fans at Truist Park was also a reminder of a strange reality: Sale has still yet to start a playoff game as a Brave, and hasn’t appeared in any October contest since the 2021 ALCS with Boston. Severe back spasms rendered Sale unavailable for Atlanta’s brief postseason run in 2024, a sour finish to his incredible debut season with the Braves that earned him his first career Cy Young Award. And though Sale finished strong and healthy in 2025, the Braves failed to qualify for the postseason for the first time since 2017.
Now here we are, fresh off an electric reminder of what Sale looks like at his best in a high-stakes ballgame, a little more than a month away from the future Hall-of-Famer’s long-awaited return to the postseason stage, barring another freak injury scare a la 2024. Sale already has one World Series title on his résumé having recorded the final out for Boston in 2018 against — you guessed it — the Dodgers. But after what happened two years ago, you can be sure Sale is plenty motivated to maintain his dominance and durability from now until deep into October. And with so many question marks remaining for the rest of Atlanta’s rotation, Sale’s outings will be especially pivotal for Atlanta’s chances of making a real run at a championship.
Latest Dodgers rotation reshuffling
Few units have shape-shifted more frequently over the past few years than the Dodgers’ rotation, which has shuffled through an astonishing range of impact arms and innings eaters in their quest to cover the marathon that is the regular season before the real stuff starts in October. This week brought another wave of arrivals and departures to L.A.’s starting staff, some planned, some unexpected. It began Tuesday with the return of right-hander Tyler Glasnow, making his first start with the Dodgers since May 6 after being sidelined with a back injury. After surrendering three runs in the first inning on a series of bloop hits, Glasnow settled in to complete five frames with seven strikeouts and only that initial trio of runs allowed. His fastball climbed to 97.4 mph and he leaned more on his slider (26%) than his more typical go-to breaking ball, the knuckle-curve (13%), but generally looked like the Glasnow we know.
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Wednesday was mercurial right-hander Roki Sasaki’s turn to take the mound, but the 24-year-old lasted only 3 1/3 innings before being removed due to a blister on his right middle-finger, which was apparently serious enough to necessitate placing him on the injured list Thursday. For all his confounding ups and downs, Sasaki has been admirably available throughout this season, taking the ball every turn through the rotation, something only Yamamoto can say among all other Dodgers hurlers. But even as Sasaki began to finally find his footing as a more reliable starter, he was unlikely to crack the Dodgers’ projected postseason rotation with the names ahead of him on the depth chart. Now he’ll be sidelined for an indeterminate amount of time, adding a layer of uncertainty to his role in October and the challenge of returning from injury (even a minor one) as the stakes are climbing. For now, veteran lefty Eric Lauer — who has quietly covered 69 innings to the tune of a 3.78 ERA for Los Angeles this season after being traded by Toronto in mid-May — is expected to step into Sasaki’s spot in the rotation.
Shohei Ohtani appears to be ramping back up on the mound after recovering from injuries. (Photo by Ric Tapia/Getty Images)
(Ric Tapia via Getty Images)
More movement awaits this weekend in Detroit, and that doesn’t even include the highly anticipated homecoming of Tarik Skubal, who is slated to face his former team at Comerica Park on Friday. The other biggest news nugget from the week in Atlanta involved an update on Shohei Ohtani, who last pitched on July 3 but has since paused his mound responsibilities while battling left knee and right bicep discomfort. Manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani will throw a bullpen Friday in Detroit with the possibility of returning to the rotation — at least in an abbreviated role — as soon as Sunday. Glasnow is still expected to pitch Sunday in some form, whether that be following an inning of Ohtani or as a full start with Ohtani instead returning Tuesday at home against St. Louis. Regardless, Ohtani is expected to slowly build his workload back up over the final month of the regular season with the goal of him being prepared to make full-length starts again come October. How many innings Ohtani racks up down the stretch will have a big impact on not only his readiness for the postseason, but also possibly his chances of snatching the NL MVP back from the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong. This weekend is a crucial first step.
Braves’ shortstop odyssey: Is this the positive turning point for Ha-Seong Kim?
Ever since Dansby Swanson departed in free agency following the 2022 season, the shortstop position has been one of the stranger subplots for the Braves. Orlando Arcia, Swanson’s first replacement, emerged as an unlikely All-Star in 2023 but ended up as a punch line in October thanks to Bryce Harper and then cratered offensively in 2024, loosening his grip on the starting job. Nick Allen followed in 2025 and brought sparkling defense but next-to-nothing with the bat, making his role as the starter untenable. Allen was then traded to Houston for Mauricio Dubón, who has handled shortstop admirably this year but is still better suited for a superutility role. All together, a whopping 17 different players have suited up at shortstop for Atlanta since Swanson left, including 10 over the past two seasons alone — more than any other team in MLB — and those players have combined to produce 3.3 fWAR and a 73 wRC+ at the position, both marks ranking last in the league.
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The latest twist in the Braves’ ongoing shortstop saga came Wednesday night. With rookie Jim Jarvis sent down to Triple-A earlier in the week, Dubón resumed his role as the starting shortstop. But a series of managerial maneuverings resulted in Atlanta forfeiting the DH and in need of a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the ninth when the pitcher’s spot came up with two outs and the winning run on second base. That prompted manager Walt Weiss to turn to Ha-Seong Kim off the bench, despite Kim having contributed virtually nothing this season due to a combination of injuries and woeful underperformance. He stepped to the plate against Dodgers closer Tanner Scott 0 for his last 30 at-bats, having not recorded a hit since June 3 and having collected only five hits all season. Sure enough, Kim smoked a full-count fastball from Scott up the middle for a walk-off single against all odds and his signature moment as a Brave — not that there were many other candidates.
Kim arrived in Atlanta almost exactly a year ago when the Braves claimed him off waivers following a failed abbreviated stint with the Rays after signing as a free agent. The idea was to buy low on the historically steady Kim as a possible everyday shortstop solution, but Kim held a $16 million player option for 2026 that he declined after the season. Then Atlanta re-asserted its interest in Kim by re-signing him to a one-year, $20 million deal, but Kim tore a ligament in his finger slipping on ice in his native South Korea in January, delaying the start to his season until mid-May. An aggravation of that same finger then cost him all of July, turning his first full season as a Brave into an afterthought. Until Wednesday, of course.
As a reward for his walk-off, Kim got the start at shortstop in Thursday’s series finale and collected one of Atlanta’s four hits against Yoshinobu Yamamoto while striking out in his other plate appearance. After such a miserable and unproductive stint to this point, it would be astounding to see Kim reclaim his post at shortstop moving forward, but his stunning resurgence this week sure has added a layer of intrigue to the rest of his season, especially at such a vital position for a contending team like Atlanta.
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Still more work to be done for Atlanta
Having already won two of three at Dodger Stadium in early May, the Braves’ sweep this week in Atlanta secured a highly valuable tiebreaker over the Dodgers. That means that if the Dodgers and Braves finish with the same record (and the second-best record in the league behind, presumably, Milwaukee), it will be Atlanta that automatically advances to the Division Series and await its opponent while the Dodgers would be subjected to the best-of-three wild-card series for the second straight year. That said, the Dodgers still have a better overall record for now at 80-54, a game ahead of the Braves, and L.A. has a notably less daunting strength of schedule the rest of the way. In fact, no National League team has a less challenging remaining slate than the Dodgers, whose only series left against teams that currently have winning records are a trip to Miami and a three-game set at home against the Padres in the final week of the season.
Meanwhile, Atlanta still has seven games left against the division rival Phillies, plus three games at home against AL leader Tampa Bay, and trips to the Cubs, Astros and Marlins. All those games left against Philadelphia will force the Braves to focus on defending their divisional lead before worrying about chasing down the Dodgers. The Brewers, while maintaining a larger cushion, face a similar dynamic with seven more games against the rival Cubs, but the rest of their September slate is a fair bit softer, so their chances of nailing down the top seed are still looking good.
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All of which is to say: While there’s real comfort in having snagged the tiebreaker over the Dodgers this week, the Braves still have plenty of more work to do to avoid having to play in that nerve-wracking opening round.