The inning that turned the Atlanta Braves' last regular-season game barely got off the ground. It was the bottom of the sixth on Sunday in Miami. JR Ritchie had allowed one run through five and was throwing his sinker four pitches in every ten, more than at any point all year. He got two quick groundouts. Then Esteury Ruiz slapped a grounder back up the middle, and Devyuson De Los Santos did the same, and Jared Serna sent a third through the left side. Two runs came home. That made three ground balls, each finding the one spot where no glove was and rolling on into open grass.

The Braves lost, 5-3, and in the standings it meant nothing. They had already won the National League East and finished 94-68. Still, if you wanted a preview of the days ahead, that inning would do. In a best-of-three series, the distance between a season and the end of it can be the width of a shortstop's reach.

That series starts Tuesday afternoon at Truist Park. The Braves, the National League's No. 3 seed, host the No. 6 Philadelphia Phillies in the Wild Card Series. All three games, if it takes three, are in Atlanta, and the winner goes to Los Angeles to face the Dodgers. During the season Atlanta beat Philadelphia nine times in 13.

Nobody in Atlanta finds that comforting.

The Braves won 101 games in 2022, and the Phillies beat them three games to one in the Division Series. The Braves won 104 games in 2023, and the Phillies beat them three games to one in the Division Series. Philadelphia has won its last three postseason series against Atlanta, going back to the 1993 NLCS, and 10 of the 14 games in them. Those weren't upsets of ordinary Braves teams. They were upsets of great ones, by the one opponent that always seemed to know where the soft spots were.

The regular season is a long record of who you are. October is a short test of what you can survive. For four years the Phillies have insisted the first isn't admissible as evidence in the second.

This time, at least, they arrive tired. The Phillies needed Game 162 to get in, and Zack Wheeler threw 97 pitches on Sunday to get them there. Jesús Luzardo, just off the injured list with left shoulder inflammation, threw four pitches the same day. He'll open Game 1, with the rookie Andrew Painter expected to take the bulk of the innings. The Braves will remember one thing about Luzardo: his last full start was a two-hit, 12-strikeout shutout of Atlanta.

Atlanta's answer is Chris Sale, and it comes with a footnote.

Sale finished with a 2.16 ERA, third-best in the majors. Against Philadelphia he was very nearly unfair: four starts, 3-0, a 2.08 ERA, and a quality start every time. The footnote is a second ledger. In seven career postseason starts, Sale has a 7.24 ERA, and in four of them he failed to get through five innings. He hasn't pitched in October since 2021. In 2024, the year he won the Cy Young, back spasms knocked him out on the final day of the regular season.

Seven starts scattered over most of a decade prove very little, which is reason for hope as much as worry. But it's the number he carries to the mound, like a letter that's been in his jacket pocket too long.

Here is the strangest thing about these Braves. Through the first five innings they were one of the worst offenses in baseball: 28th in runs, dead last in wRC+, a measure where 100 is league average and theirs was 90. From the sixth inning on, they scored 344 runs, second-most in the majors, the overwhelming majority of them against bullpens.

They're like a restaurant that sits empty until nine and then turns people away at the door.

The usual October theory says this can't last. Opponents bring their best relievers early and often, and a team that feeds on middle relief goes hungry. But the theory assumes the other team has good relievers to bring.

The Phillies' bullpen had a 4.43 ERA this season. In September it had a 5.79 ERA and put 1.58 men on base per inning. In a normal October, Philadelphia would plug that hole by moving a healthy starter to the bullpen. This October the starters were used up just getting here. Atlanta's bullpen, meanwhile, posted a 3.44 ERA and gets Robert Suarez back from an elbow injury.

So the question for Tuesday isn't really whether the Braves can hit Luzardo and Painter. It's whether they can stay close long enough for the sixth inning to arrive.

They have reasons to think they can. Ronald Acuña Jr. hit .307 with a .950 OPS in September and had a 1.377 OPS in seven games against the Phillies that month. They have reasons to worry, too. Austin Riley became the first Brave to strike out 200 times in a season, and Ozzie Albies hit .175 over his last 42 games. This was a team that lost Spencer Schwellenbach, Hurston Waldrep and Joey Wentz in the spring, then Spencer Strider, Reynaldo López and Bryce Elder during the season, and now Martín Pérez. It still finished with the majors' sixth-best rotation ERA. In his first year, Walt Weiss took over a team that had gone 76-86 and won a division. Nobody in October will give him credit for any of it.

They were the better team in 2022, too, and in 2023. The spreadsheets don't have a column for memory. What a best-of-three measures isn't the season. It's what a team does when the ground ball finds the grass.

On the left side of the Truist Park infield on Tuesday there will be a stretch of turf between the shortstop and the third baseman, clipped and green and a few feet wide. For two afternoons, maybe three, the Braves' whole season will fit inside it.