Phils' Martin loses homecoming game

Ethan Cash Martin grew up 90 minutes from Atlanta in Toccoa, a city of just under 10,000 that sits on the Georgia-South Carolina border in northern Georgia. Martin said he has gone to quite a few Braves games over the years, even back when the team was playing at Fulton County Stadium.

He went to a playoff game at Turner Field as a high school freshman in the fall of 2004. He idolized David Justice as a kid and wanted to be John Smoltz when he grew up. Martin's baseball dreams came true a half-decade ago, when the Los Angeles Dodgers drafted him in the first round out of Stephens County High School. But last night had to be a particularly special moment, making his third career big-league start in the ballpark he used to come to as a fan. Martin tried to put the nerves and butterflies aside and focus on throwing a barrage of fastballs at a fastball-pummeling Braves batting order. "It wasn't that bad," Martin said of taking the mound, "I was kind of surprised." The results were mixed for the rookie pitcher, but typical for a Phillies team that can't find any positive momentum in the season's second half. Martin struck out six Braves in five innings but also served up a two-run home run to Chris Johnson as the Phils lost, 3-1. The defeat was the 18th in the last 22 games for the Phillies. Martin bravely fired a fastball that hovered from 93-95 mph at Atlanta. He allowed hits to the first two batters he faced but showed poise in bouncing back to get the next three without allowing the ball to leave the infield.

"He battled them, he stayed in there with them," manager Charlie Manuel said. "He was aggressive. He went right at them . . . He did all right. He gave us a chance to stay in the game." Martin made three mistakes in five innings and two came back to bite him. In the second inning, he allowed a two-out, run-scoring double to opposing pitcher Kris Medlen. In the third, Martin responded to a leadoff double from Justin Upton by striking out Atlanta's two All-Stars, Freddie Freeman and Brian McCann, in back-to-back at-bats. But after falling behind to Johnson, Martin left a 2-1 fastball middle-in and the ball ended up sailing just over the leftfield fence as the difference in the game. Both he and Manuel thought the previous pitch was a strike. "That really hurt him," Manuel said. "It was close,"

Martin said of the plate ump's call. "Of course I'd like to have it. But he called it a ball and I didn't regroup and make the next pitch." While Martin needed 96 pitches to get through five innings and failed to pitch beyond the fifth for his third straight start, he was hardly to blame for the Phils' latest loss. Medlen breezed through the Phillies lineup like many an opposing pitcher in 2013. The Phils failed to score more than one run in a game for the 21st time in 119 games this season. Not surprisingly, they have lost all of those games. The Phillies fell to 13-49 this season in games when they've scored fewer than four runs. They've scored three runs or less in 62 of their 119 games, or 52 percent of the time. But for one night, Manuel wasn't disappointed in the offensive effort.

"We hit eight or 10 balls on the screws," Manuel said. "We came away with one run, [but] we did hit some balls hard. That's a good sign. There is nothing negative about that. If you keep hitting them like that, you will score some runs." Medlen held the Phillies to one run on five hits in seven innings. The Phils finished with six hits, with Chase Utley (3-for-4) accounting for half of them. Like Martin, at least two Phillies also endured growing pains last night.

After Utley ended Medlen's stretch of retiring 15 straight batters with a two-out double in the sixth, Domonic Brown knocked in the game's first run. But Brown got a little too aggressive on the basepaths: He was thrown out trying to turn a single into a double. "He was trying to do too much, trying to make something happen," Manuel said. "Sometimes when you're not winning, that's what you do." Medlen's aforementioned double, meanwhile, probably could have got an assist from first baseman-turned-leftfielder-turned-rightfielder Darin Ruf.

The line drive hit sailed over Ruf's head with two outs in the second inning. Ruf only began playing the outfield a year ago and made his first professional start in right five nights earlier. "You have to give him a pass until he gets some experience," Manuel said. "If you put him out there, you can't expect him to be perfect. Sometimes you can go 2 or 3 days and you get by, then all of a sudden you make a mistake. That's what happens when you experiment with a guy like that."

source: philly

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