ATLANTA — In an all-or-nothing, loser-exits-the-season playoff game, starting a pitcher with all of 18 ⅓ innings pitched on the year is definitely one strategy. Bringing in your 200-strikeout ace, who threw 95 pitches just two days ago, to cover the critical final outs of the game is also a strategy. Fortunately for the Atlanta Braves, neither of these unconventional strategies blew up in manager Walt Weiss’ face on Thursday, and as a result, Atlanta is now on the way to the NLDS to face Los Angeles.
In a bit of full-circle harmony, the Braves’ most experienced pitcher and one of its least experienced came together to hold the line for Atlanta against the Phillies in a 6-2 victory. Ray Kerr started the no-tomorrow game, and if you have no idea who that is, you’re not alone. Chris Sale finished the game, and if you don’t know his whole story, well, you can visit his plaque in Cooperstown in a few years.
“Hopefully Ray Kerr became a bit of a household name tonight,” Weiss said after the game. “He deserves it. He’s got an amazing story.”
Kerr’s backstory went from cute anecdote to folk legend in the time it took him to throw 3 ⅓ scoreless innings against the Phillies, his longest — and, obviously, most critical — outing of the year. Now 32, he grew up in Reno, Nevada, one of six children, falling in love with fishing and bouncing in and out of foster care. He worked at a 7-Eleven and a movie theater before enrolling at Lassen Community College in California. He pitched well enough there and in the Alaska Baseball League that the Mariners and Marlins showed interest, and the Mariners offered him a minor-league slot and a $2,000 signing bonus in 2017.
He topped out in the Seattle system at Triple-A, and the Mariners dealt him to San Diego, where he saw his first major-league action in 2022. The Padres sent him to Atlanta in December 2023, but Tommy John surgery sidelined him for much of 2024 and all of 2025. After a stint playing for Atlanta’s Triple-A Gwinnett Stripers, he returned to Atlanta’s roster in August, and here we are.
Weiss told Kerr on Wednesday that he’d be starting the critical Game 3, though the game’s actual start time remained very much in question, because of MLB’s scheduling shenanigans.
“It was kind of hectic because we didn’t know if the game was starting at 2 or 8,” Kerr said after the game, drenched in celebratory champagne. “So I was like, ‘Am I going to bed this time, or this time?'”
Kerr settled his mind the best way he knew how: with a viewing of Druski’s horror comedy “Livestream from Hell.” On Thursday, with the rest of the clubhouse staying loose by talking about their fantasy football teams, he stayed locked in, focusing on the culmination of a dream he’d carried for his entire life.
Kerr faced the teeth of Philadelphia’s order right from the start. In the first inning, he surrendered only a single to Kyle Schwarber while inducing outs from Trea Turner and Alec Bohm and striking out the mighty and dreaded Bryce Harper. Given a three-run cushion in the bottom of the first, he cruised from there, facing the minimum until the top of the fourth, when a walk to Schwarber and a forceout of Harper brought Weiss to the mound to wrap up Kerr’s night.
“He wasn’t rattled at all,” Weiss said. “Looked like a 10-year vet making a start, and he was phenomenal.”
Still, this is Atlanta, land of 28-3, home of the one-World-Series-in-the-’90s Braves, where nobody’s too comfortable until a good five or six months after winning a trophy. So yes, the Braves posted a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the first on Michael Harris II’s three-run shot, and yes, Atlanta added two more runs in the fourth off Ozzie Albies’ bat, and yes, Matt Olson added a sixth in the seventh. But when Philadelphia’s Derek Hill tripled to start the eighth, and Turner sacrificed him home, and Schwarber and Harper lurked, well, it didn’t matter that the Phillies’ win probability was a mere 2.3%. A murmur ran through the Truist Park crowd. If it could happen to anyone …
So Sale came on to finish the eighth and pitch the ninth. But to get there, we have to take a detour through Weiss’ office.
Weiss arrived at the ballpark on Thursday to find Sale sitting in his office, grinning.
“I feel amazing,” Sale said, despite the fact that he’d thrown 6 ⅓ innings of playoff ball just two days prior.
“Well,” Weiss replied, “let’s talk.”
Weiss had already decided not to ask Sale if he wanted to pitch, since he knew Sale would say yes, even if his arm were hanging on by a thread. But when Sale made the offer, Weiss happily took him up on it. They mapped out a plan to have Sale face the wicked top of Philadelphia’s order late in the game, and that’s exactly how it played out, with Sale blowing away Harper in the bottom of the eighth and striking out two more to close out the ninth.
“I’ve run out of superlatives for Chris Sale,” Weiss said. “When you take everything into consideration — teammate, competitor, performer, work ethic, all those things — he’s as good as I’ve ever been around.”
Coming from a guy who has played baseball alongside and against the best of the past four decades, that’s some high praise.
It’s impossible to overstate the psychological lift this series win will have on both Braves players and Braves fans. This is a team that has played consistently strong, often excellent baseball for more than 35 years, with only two World Series rings to show for it. That’s the same as the Marlins and Blue Jays, just one more than the Royals, Nationals and Angels.
Over the past 27 seasons dating to 2000, the Braves have reached the playoffs 16 times. But in that entire stretch, they’ve won their initial series just four times, including this year. And they’ve won multiple playoff series in a single postseason just twice, in 2020 and in 2021, their world championship year.
Now, though, the win-loss record resets to 0-0. The Braves travel to Los Angeles to take on the Dodgers, a team Atlanta beat five out of six times in the regular season. There’s still October baseball ahead for these Braves, as unexpected as that might’ve seemed at the start of this year.
“Nobody had us making the playoffs,” Weiss said. “These guys have overcome so much. Then to boot, at the end of the year, we lose three more starters. We barely have enough starters to play a series, yet it’s guys like Ray Kerr and everybody else that step up and perform when the stakes are highest. It’s such a great group.”
The Braves begin the NLDS against the Dodgers on Saturday in Los Angeles and will return to Atlanta for at least one game starting Tuesday. Who will pitch? Who’s to say? The Braves probably won’t want to attempt the same sort of all-hands-on-deck strategy they employed in Game 3, but they now know for sure that it’s an option.
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