The regular season comes to an end on Sunday for the Braves and Marlins in Miami, with National League East champion Atlanta headed for a wild-card series showdown with an opponent still to be determined.
The Braves (94-67) will make their eighth postseason appearance in nine seasons, coming from a fourth-place finish in the division last season to first place in 2026. They will finish up with Game 162 on Sunday by turning to rookie right-hander JR Ritchie (1-4, 4.79 ERA) to make his 11th start and 17th appearance of the season.
Ritchie has made two starts this month and lost both. He allowed six earned runs on seven hits in 4 2/3 innings in an 8-4 setback to the Chicago Cubs on Sept. 16, then started at home against the Cincinnati Reds six days later and yielded one run on four hits in five innings of a 4-0 defeat.
Ritchie, 23, struck out eight and walked three in that game.
He’s facing Miami for the second time this season after permitting six runs on five hits in four innings on May 18.
The Marlins on Sunday will counter with right-hander Janson Junk (6-9, 4.31), who — like Ritchie — also is from the Seattle area. Junk is 4-4 with a 3.66 ERA over his last 15 appearances but has pitched more than six innings only once this season.
Junk tossed five scoreless innings in his last start on Tuesday against the Chicago Cubs. Before that, he made it through only three innings in his previous two starts.
Junk is 0-2 with an 11.25 ERA against Atlanta in two starts this season. He is 1-2 with a 7.63 ERA in three career meetings versus the Braves.
The Marlins (79-82) have matched the 2025 season’s win total and can get to 80 wins in a season for the 10th time in franchise history and the first since 2023, when the club went 84-78.
The Marlins can establish a single-season record for wins at loanDepot Park with a victory Sunday, which would be their 47th at home. That said, Miami finds itself outside the playoff picture again.
Jakob Marsee is batting .342 in September despite going 0-for-3 in Miami’s 8-3 loss on Saturday. He is batting .231 on the season, a rise from .189 at the end of June.
“Jakob’s tough,” Marlins manager Clayton McCullough said. “This is a difficult place to struggle. [Between] the expectations that he and we had for him coming into the year and how much we were going to count on him, and to not get off to the greatest start, to really struggle for the first half of the season, but to still hang in there — continue to try to find ways to get out of that, make adjustments, continue to play good defense, take high-quality at-bats — and then for things to turn and for him to perform like this speaks to a lot of his grit and toughness.”
The Braves are feeling good about their bullpen as the regular season winds to a close, and the postseason beckons. They’ve gone with bullpen games in each of the past two games of the Miami series.
“Top to bottom, this is about as good as our bullpen has been all year,” manager Walt Weiss told MLB.com.
–Field Level Media
