Cristopher Sánchez still had his changeup in the seventh. Atlanta found another way through.

With runners at first and second and nobody out in the seventh, Cristopher Sánchez opened against Ronald Acuña Jr. with a changeup. Acuña swung through it. Four pitches later, after a sinker for a called strike and two balls, Sánchez returned to the changeup at 88.4 mph. Another swing. Another miss.

It was Sánchez’s sixth strikeout and his 104th pitch. His ability to miss a bat had not disappeared. Atlanta’s next two scoring plays showed why that alone could not protect the tie.

Drake Baldwin doubled off a sinker to drive in Sean Murphy. After an intentional walk to Ozzie Albies, Matt Olson lifted another sinker for a sacrifice fly. Sánchez left with Philadelphia trailing 3–1, charged with three runs in 6⅔ innings. Alex McFarlane stranded the two runners he inherited. Philadelphia later rallied to win 4–3.

The 116-pitch record describes an outing that resists a simple lost-stuff explanation. Sánchez’s sinker was slightly harder than its regular-season average. His changeup finished four of his six strikeouts. The difference came through accumulated traffic, difficult plate appearances and contact whose results varied sharply.

The changeup worked inside the zone

Sánchez threw 35 changeups, averaging 87.9 mph. Under a non-bunt swing definition, Atlanta missed nine times in 16 swings, a 56.3% whiff rate. Eight of those nine misses came on pitches Baseball Savant classified inside the strike zone.

That distinction changes the explanation. This was not mainly a story of hitters repeatedly chasing a changeup beneath the zone. Atlanta offered at only three of the 19 changeups classified outside it. Much of the pitch’s success came when hitters attacked a delivery that the tracking system placed within the zone.

The changeup supplied different routes to a strikeout. It caught Baldwin looking in the first inning. It finished Michael Harris II in the second and Baldwin in the third. In the seventh, it still gave Sánchez a way past Acuña with a runner in scoring position.

One additional missed bunt occurred on a changeup. It is excluded from the non-bunt whiff rate used here; including that attempt changes the changeup count to 10 misses in 17 attempts. That difference is a definition, not evidence of an extra conventional swing-and-miss.

More sinkers and fewer changeups than the season baseline

Sánchez’s selection did change, but not in the direction the strikeout results might suggest. The changeup accounted for 30.2% of his pitches, down from 37.1% across 3,158 tracked regular-season pitches. His sinker rose from 44.4% to 50.0%; the slider increased more modestly, from 18.5% to 19.8%.

The sinker averaged 95.6 mph, compared with 95.1 in that season sample. His changeup was also faster, at 87.9 rather than 87.0. Those are descriptive averages, not a diagnosis of how well he located either pitch.

The two main pitches had different jobs. The sinker produced 11 called strikes and four misses in 33 non-bunt swings. The changeup supplied the larger share of the misses. The slider added six called strikes but only one miss in seven swings.

Neither the usage comparison nor the movement data establishes what Sánchez intended. They show the distribution Atlanta faced: more sinkers than his season norm, with a changeup that remained difficult to contact when hitters swung.

The five walks need an explanation

The official line lists five walks. Two were intentional: Acuña in the fifth and Albies in the seventh. The three unintentional walks came against Acuña to begin the first, Ha-Seong Kim to begin the third, and Murphy to begin the seventh.

Those distinctions matter. The intentional passes were game decisions; they should not be counted as five separate episodes of losing the strike zone. The other three did create work, and two of those runners ultimately scored.

The first inning took 23 pitches. Acuña’s seven-pitch walk started it, and Olson’s eight-pitch single brought him home. Sánchez then kept Atlanta scoreless for five innings, but doing so required both strikeouts and help on contact.

In the sixth, singles by Albies, Mauricio Dubón and Austin Riley loaded the bases around an Olson strikeout. Harris then hit a first-pitch sinker to first baseman Alec Bohm, starting a home-to-first double play. One pitch turned a bases-loaded problem into the end of the inning.

The seventh combined pressure with very different contact

Murphy’s six-pitch walk opened the seventh. Kim followed with a sacrifice bunt on which he also reached first. That advanced the runner and left Sánchez needing to record all three outs with two men aboard.

The Acuña strikeout was the first. Baldwin then stayed through a six-pitch plate appearance and doubled on a 95.4 mph sinker. The ball left his bat at 89.2 mph, below Statcast’s 95 mph hard-hit threshold, yet it produced a run and put two runners in scoring position.

Olson’s sacrifice fly was a different kind of contact: 107.7 mph off the bat. It scored Kim and became Sánchez’s final pitch. The two run-producing balls should not be flattened into one explanation of either overpowering contact or pure misfortune.

Across the outing, eight of Atlanta’s 20 fair balls in play reached 95 mph. That total includes a bunt among the 20 balls, which is why the overall 86.3 mph average exit velocity needs context. There was hard contact in the record as well as softer balls that became hits.

What the complete record supports

The seventh required 25 pitches, Sánchez’s largest inning total. It did not come with a collapse in average sinker velocity: the pitch averaged 95.5 mph in that inning, compared with 96.0 in the first and 96.1 in the sixth. Those averages cannot diagnose fatigue or rule it out, but they do make a simple velocity-loss narrative inadequate.

Sánchez retained a useful changeup and an above-baseline sinker average. He also allowed enough traffic that a bunt, a below-threshold double and a hard sacrifice fly could change the score before he finished seven innings.

The next question is whether the reduced changeup share repeats, and whether its ability to beat swings inside the zone remains as pronounced. This outing shows a pitch that continued to work within a performance that became increasingly difficult to contain.

The other side of Game 2

Read our separate analysis of Tyler Mahle’s splitter-heavy seven innings.