Harris' pinch-hit HR fuels Braves' comeback in Weiss' mile-high homecoming

DENVER -- Being down 5-0 before recording an out in the game can give a manager pause and get the blood flowing in the bullpen. But when Walt Weiss found himself in that position Friday night in his first game back at Coors Field as a manager, he took it in stride.

Weiss managed the Rockies for four years and played shortstop for Colorado for four years before that, earning more at-bats with the Rockies than he did with the A’s, Braves or Marlins. He knows a thing or two about how to navigate mile-high baseball.

“I'm not going to sit here and say I’ve got the secret sauce, but the game's a little different here,” Weiss said before the series opener. Then he drew on his experience -- and perhaps some secret sauce -- as his team erased a six-run deficit and then sealed the 8-6 victory with a towering two-run, pinch-hit homer from Michael Harris II in Weiss’ high-altitude homecoming.

“I was just hoping it went out, and it did,” Harris said. “That was the only thing really going through my mind. I hit it hard enough, but I thought I hit it too high.”

It was Harris’ first career pinch-hit home run, and he is the first Braves hitter with a go-ahead pinch-hit home run in the ninth inning or later since Charlie Culberson’s walk-off two-run home run vs. Washington on June 3, 2018.

The Rockies' five-run first inning came via two walks and five hits, and they added another unanswered run in the second on Mickey Moniak’s 439-foot solo homer to right.

“They say hitting is contagious, and I guess I got the cold pretty quick,” starting pitcher Grant Holmes said of his outing. “I couldn't get rid of it.”

Until he did. After the second-inning homer, Holmes allowed just one more hit and a walk in four more innings on the hill, leaving the game down 6-1.

“Grant Holmes had the rough first inning, and he stayed in the fight and ended up going five and keeping that game within reach,” Weiss said. “You've got to keep playing here. I've seen that movie many times [after] 15 years in this place. I know how quickly it can turn, and that's why you stay in it, and you hope you get a chance like tonight.”

With his first victory from the visiting dugout under his belt, Weiss acknowledged that patience was one of his secret sauce’s key ingredients.

“You've got to be careful here with the quick hook, especially first game of a series, because you can blow up your whole bullpen with two games left here,” Weiss said. “I had [Hunter] Stratton up three times in the first five innings -- it was that close to Grant coming out.”

Anthony Molina pitched scoreless sixth and seventh innings in his Braves debut after his contract was selected from Triple-A Gwinnett earlier in the day, returning to the park he’d called home for the past two years.

“I know the field, I know the stadium, I know Denver, so that's a good point for me,” Molina said. “I was trying to execute pitches, trying to be better. And I did. I helped the team.”

Atlanta began battling back in the fourth when Matt Olson launched his 10th homer of the season, a 415-foot blast to right. They pushed across another unearned run in the seventh to set up the explosive eighth.

Weiss’ patience with the park paid off as the Braves loaded the bases with three free passes, then cleared them with a one-out triple down the right-field line from Mauricio Dubón to make it a 6-5 game. The Braves tied it with a sac fly from Austin Riley to plate Dubón and set up the decisive final frame.

“[Harris] is a silver bullet over there,” Weiss said of the author behind the game-winning smash. “He showed up tonight. That's unbelievable, Mikey stepping up there and hitting the homer [after] Dubón had the big hit of the night to get us close.”

At 23-10, the Braves have the most wins in baseball, and over half of those -- an even dozen -- are comeback wins, the second most in the Majors.

Harris quibbled with characterizations of the Braves’ early-season success as “unbelievable.”

“We believe in each other,” Harris said. “We knew, even in spring and coming into the first game of the season, what we had and the group of guys we have, the coaches, everybody on the staff. We believe in each other, so I wouldn’t say it's unbelievable.”