Future HOF Randy Johnson wins 299

http://www.ajc.com/business/content/sports/braves/stories/2009/05/28/braves_giants.html

San Francisco — He’s 45 and not quite as ferocious as he was when he threw 100-mph fastballs, but Randy Johnson showed Wednesday night that he still can manhandle the Braves.

The Giants’ giant left-hander notched his 299th career win with six innings of three-hit, one-run ball, leading San Francisco to a 6-3 win that completed a series sweep against the Braves at AT&T Park.

Randy can still win — we didn’t rough him up at all,” said manager Bobby Cox, whose Braves had won five of their last six at home before coming to San Francisco and being swept by the Giants for the first time since 2003.

Chipper Jones, playing with a sprained right big toe, went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts, the first time the Braves third baseman whiffed four times in 2,060 major league games. Three of his strikeouts were against Johnson, who had given up a career-high six home runs to Jones in 33 at-bats before Wednesday.

“He just caught me at a good time,” said Jones, who tried to take his first Golden Sombrero (four strikeouts in a game) in stride, given the circumstances. “You just write it off as an 0-for-4 and try not to think about the punchouts.”

Braves starter Kenshin Kawakami (3-6) was charged with four runs (three earned), nine hits and four walks in 5-2/3 innings. His control wasn’t anywhere close to what it had been five days earlier, when he threw eight scoreless innings with three hits and no walks to beat Toronto and ace Roy Halladay.

Kawakami had been 2-2 with a 2.63 ERA in four May starts before Wednesday.

“I was aware [Johnson] was close to 300 wins,” he said through a translator. “It’s really a disappointment that I couldn’t pitch the way I wanted to today.”

Johnson (4-4) had five strikeouts with no walks while improving to 3-0 with a microscopic 0.64 ERA in his past four starts against the Braves, a stretch that began with his 13-strikeout perfect game at Atlanta in 2004.

The 6-foot-10 pitcher was 2-5 in eight starts against the Braves before that.

On striking out Jones three times, Johnson said: “We’re still not even. He’s still got some real good numbers against me.”

Jones struck out with a runner at third and one out in the fourth inning, and struck out with a runner on first to end the sixth with the Braves trailing 2-1. He nearly buckled from pain while swinging at strike three on the latter at-bat.

He missed four starts before returning to the lineup Tuesday. The 37-year-old switch-hitter was asked after Wednesday’s game if it was painful to swing.

“Right-handed, yes,” Jones said. “Left-handed, no. Right-handed, it’s tough on me right now. I have no back foot, not back side, and I can’t push off. I’m lunging real bad. It made everything Randy threw tonight 4 or 5 miles [per hour] harder.”

Johnson’s last start against the Braves before Wednesday was a win on May 24, 2008. Since then, he was 10-13 with a 4.47 ERA in 31 starts against everyone else.

Pinch-hitter Garret Anderson’s two-run, two-out single in the seventh inning trimmed the lead to 4-3, but the Braves stranded two in the inning, and the Giants added two runs against reliever Eric O’Flaherty on four consecutive hits in bottom of the seventh.

It was the Giants’ first sweep against the Braves since an August 2003 series at AT&T Park, where the Braves’ 12-21 record is their worst this decade at any ballpark where they’ve played at least 15 games.

The Braves are 9-15 against Giants since beginning of 2006 season, including seven losses in their past eight games at the ballpark by the bay.

Their seven-game trip continues Thursday in Phoenix with the opener of a four-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Casey Kotchman’s two-out RBI single in the sixth cut the lead to 2-1, after Jordan Schafer led off with a single and advanced on a Kawakami sacrifice.

Until Anderson’s two-out single in the seventh, the Braves had scored only three runs in the first 24 innings of the series.

In all three games, the Giants scored two or more runs before the Braves got on the board, including a 2-0 lead after three innings Wednesday.

The Giants got a run in the second inning after Fred Lewis drew a leadoff walk, stole second and advanced on a wild pitch — a scenario that’s happened too often lately with Braves pitchers. He scored on Juan Uribe’s single.

They scored their second run on an unsual play in the third inning, a double steal that probably deserved an asterisk.

They had runners on first and third with one out when Edgar Renteria stole second. Braves catcher David Ross threw to the base, and second baseman Martin Prado came up to catch it and throw back to keep Aaron Rowand from scoring.

Rowand held up, but Prado’s throw to the plate was low and bounced off Ross and back to the grass in front of the plate. When Ross went to pick it up, he slipped. Rowand seized the opportunity to race home, scoring just in front of the tag after Ross recovered and lunged to the plate.

Right fielder Jeff Francoeur prevented the Giants from making it a 3-0 lead in the fifth, when he fired a throw to the plate to nail heavy-footed catcher Bengie Molina trying to score from second on Travis Ishikawa’s two-out single.