Braves Eliminate Phillies, Head to NLDS vs Dodgers

October baseball in Atlanta finally has a happy ending again. The Braves beat the Philadelphia Phillies 6-2 on Thursday night in the decisive Game 3 of the National League Wild Card Series at Truist Park, punching their ticket to the Braves NLDS matchup against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Three home runs and six pitchers did the damage, and a sellout crowd of 41,731 watched the Braves win a winner-take-all game for the first time in three decades. The victory also gave Atlanta its first playoff series win since the 2021 World Series, according to the Associated Press.

The Braves wasted no time. In the bottom of the first, with Ronald Acuna Jr. and Matt Olson aboard after walks, Michael Harris II jumped on an Aaron Nola sinker and launched a three-run homer to right-center, staking Atlanta to a 3-0 lead it would never give back. Nola, the Phillies' longest-tenured pitcher, never recovered and was pulled after just one and two-thirds innings, charged with three runs on two hits and two walks. Philadelphia even turned to ace Zack Wheeler in relief, but the bleeding did not stop: Ozzie Albies crushed a two-run homer off Wheeler in the fourth, and Olson went deep in the seventh to cap the scoring, the Associated Press reported.

Six arms, one shutdown: how the Braves pieced it together

With their rotation stretched thin, the Braves turned Game 3 into a bullpen relay, and every arm delivered. Opener Ray Kerr, making his postseason debut after just nine regular-season appearances, tossed three and one-third scoreless innings of one-hit ball and left to a standing ovation. Grant Holmes followed with two innings and earned the win. Then came Robert Suarez, Didier Fuentes and Dylan Dodd, and finally a familiar face in an unfamiliar role: Chris Sale, the Game 1 starter, returned on short rest to record the final four outs, striking out three of the five batters he faced, according to Field Level Media.

The context makes the win even bigger. This was Atlanta's first victory in a winner-take-all postseason game since Game 7 of the 1996 National League Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, snapping a six-game losing streak in elimination games that dated back to the 2018 division series against the Dodgers. It was also the franchise's first playoff series win ever against Philadelphia, which had knocked the Braves out in the 1993 NLCS and the 2022 and 2023 division series. Manager Walt Weiss summed up the night: "I told our guys, man, all year long when the stakes have been the highest, when the challenges have been the toughest, we've been at our absolute best. So it doesn't surprise me that we played the way we did tonight."

The Phillies, meanwhile, were left to process a familiar kind of heartbreak. They had forced the deciding game with a 4-3 extra-inning win on Wednesday night, but the offense never showed up Thursday. The loss extended Philadelphia's losing streak in winner-take-all games to four and snapped its four-year streak of reaching at least the division series round. "If you don't win the last game, it's a crash landing no matter what. It doesn't matter where it is," interim manager Don Mattingly said, according to NBC Sports.

What the Braves NLDS date with the Dodgers looks like

The reward for surviving is a date with the beast of the National League. The Braves NLDS matchup is a best-of-five series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the two-time defending World Series champions, starting Saturday at Dodger Stadium. Game 1 is set for Saturday afternoon, with the series shifting back to Atlanta for Game 3 on Tuesday. The Dodgers are chasing a three-peat, and they have the roster to do it, which makes Atlanta the clear underdog on paper.

But October has a way of ignoring the paper. The Braves just beat a Phillies team built for this month, and they did it with depth pitching, power up and down the lineup, and a bullpen that bent without breaking. Sale's willingness to close on short rest gives Weiss a genuine weapon for the late innings of the Braves NLDS, and the lineup that produced three homers Thursday can change any game in one swing. The Dodgers will be favored, and they should be, but Atlanta arrives with something the last few Octobers did not provide: momentum and belief.

There is also the matter of history. The Dodgers ended Atlanta's season in the 2018 division series, the first loss in that six-game elimination-game skid the Braves just snapped. A Braves NLDS rematch eight years later, with the defending champions standing in the way of a pennant, is the kind of storyline October was made for. First pitch Saturday will tell whether Thursday night was the start of a run or just a great night at Truist Park. Either way, for one evening, Atlanta got to exhale, and 41,731 people got to watch the Braves finally win the game they always seemed to lose.