Braves 5, Phillies 3: Riley's Eighth-Inning Homer Off Duran

The gum fell out. The ball did not come back.

September 29, 2026 - Atlanta - Austin Riley said he remembered his gum falling out of his mouth as he rounded the bases. That is not a speech. That is a man who just hit a three-run homer off Jhoan Duran with two outs in the eighth, a 99.9 mph four-seamer to right-center, and the Atlanta Braves were suddenly ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies 5-3 in Game 1 of the National League Wild Card Series.

Sunny. 80 degrees. Wind 3 mph and calm. First pitch 2:16 p.m. Attendance 30,127. The game lasted 2 hours, 26 minutes. Truist Park had a 1-0 series lead before dinner.

"I'm happy for Austin Riley," manager Walt Weiss said, per MLB.com. "It's been a tough year for him. But this just goes to show you, when the playoffs start, everything starts at zero."

Sale for 6 1/3. Luzardo for five. Then the seventh got loud.

Chris Sale threw 6 1/3 innings: four hits, three earned, one walk, nine strikeouts, 95 pitches. He did not get the win. He also did not leave a mess that Atlanta could not live with. Two of the three runs he was charged with scored after he left.

Jesús Luzardo threw five innings: three hits, one earned, one walk, six strikeouts, 77 pitches. He hit Riley and Ronald Acuña Jr.. He did not give Philadelphia a reason to pull him for volume. Alec Bohm doubled Kyle Schwarber home in the first. 1-0. That was the whole Phillies lead for six innings.

Mike Yastrzemski singled Ozzie Albies home in the second. Riley had already reached. 1-1. Albies tripled Michael Harris II home in the sixth. 2-1 Atlanta. Sale still looked like the best left-hander on the field.

Then J.T. Realmuto tripled to right with two outs in the seventh. Bryan De La Cruz scored. Bryson Stott scored. Didier Fuentes inherited two runners from Sale and both of them scored. 3-2 Philadelphia. Sale was in the clubhouse getting arm care, watching a delayed feed, when the inning flipped. He heard the building before he saw the swing.

Duran for two. Riley for three.

Duran entered a 3-2 game and threw two innings. Nine batters. Two hits. Three earned. One homer. One loss. One blown save. Albies was hit by a pitch. Harris already had three hits. Riley's homer made it 5-3. Four of Riley's six career postseason homers have been go-ahead shots, the MLB recap said. Three of those have come in the eighth inning or later.

Dylan Lee threw a clean eighth for the win: no hits, one strikeout. Raisel Iglesias threw the ninth for the save: one hit, no runs, seven pitches. Philadelphia's last look was a single and nothing behind it.

Riley went 1-for-3 with the homer, three RBI, a hit by pitch, and the only run that will be clipped all winter. Albies went 1-for-2 with a triple, a walk, a hit by pitch, two runs, and an RBI. Harris went 3-for-3 with two runs. Realmuto went 1-for-3 with the triple and two RBI. Bohm doubled in the first run. Schwarber singled, walked, and scored. Edmundo Sosa doubled. The Phillies had six hits. They led twice. They did not lead last.

"I know how my season went," Riley said, per MLB.com. "It's not the way I wanted it to. But that's the beauty of the postseason. You get a clean slate and go out there and try to do something for the boys and for this city."

He hit .219 with 19 homers in the regular season. Weiss did not pretend that line was the story. The story was a 99.9 mph pitch in the eighth of a Wild Card opener against a club that had beaten Atlanta in the 2022 and 2023 NLDS. Philadelphia had won six of the previous eight postseason games between these two this decade. Game 1 went the other way.

"It doesn't get more fun than this, playing this game in the postseason," Weiss said, per MLB.com. "You can imagine going from losing the lead to something like that. The swinging emotions are enormous. What a big home run."

Sale, still on delay, heard the clubhouse lose its mind four seconds before the TV caught up. "I just couldn't be happier for him," he said, per MLB.com.

Game 2 is Wednesday. The slate is already 1-0.

Atlanta hosts Game 2 on Wednesday. In the history of the best-of-three Wild Card Series, teams that take a 1-0 lead have won the series 21 of 24 times, the MLB recap said. Home teams that win Game 1 have not lost a series. That is a note, not a parade. Philadelphia still has Luzardo's five innings in the file and a closer who has to throw again.

Riley's regular season does not travel into October. Duran's regular season does not either. Tuesday was one swing and a 5-3 that Atlanta will take without asking for a prettier path.

AthX Engine after the baseball

AthX Engine (our projection and scoring system) put Atlanta at 10 team fantasy points on a 5-3. Sale had 18.33 pitching FP. Riley had 9 hitting FP. Albies had 8. Harris had 5. Luzardo had 15 pitching FP in a loss.

Fantasy points measure the night under platform scoring rules. Share prices also move with traders through dynamic pricing. They are related. They are not the same number.

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*Sources: MLB.com schedule; MLB Gameday wrap; ESPN scoreboard; ESPN box score; AthX Engine scoring applied to verified box stats. Information only; not financial advice.*