The Washington Nine are notoriously mediocre on the road — and the road includes places like Colorado where, on Thursday, the Nationals’ bats once again proved vulnerable to good (but not great) pitching. The Colorado Rockies, suffering through their own sub-.500 season, beat the Nationals easily, 6-3, extending the team’s road woes this year. The Nationals have lost ten of their last 13 on the road.

The Nats first inning was promising, with Rick Ankiel, Ryan Zimmerman and Michael Morse reaching base — but the team was unable to capitalize (scoring just one). It would be another eight innings before the Nationals threatened, sending six hitters to the plate before succumbing. So which is it: did the Nationals have a poor game at the plate — or was Rockies’ starter Esmil Rogers so good that the Nats Nine just couldn’t touch him?

The explanation, courtesy of Nats’ skipper Davey Johnson, is that while Rogers was good, he was nothing special. The problem is the hitting: “We had the right guys up there,” Johnson said. “We just didn’t make it happen. We picked it up in the ninth inning, but it was a little too late.”

If there was a piece of good news that Nats’ fans could take from the loss, it was that long reliever Ross Detwiler proved “serviceable” (Davey Johnson’s term) in his first start in since forever, throwing five complete innings while giving up five hits. But the Rockies got to Detwiler for one in the fourth, and then one more in fifth, before piling in on Ryan Mattheus in the eighth.

The Rockies’ eighth included a walk (to Todd Helton), a Troy Tulowitzki double, an intentional walk, a single, a hit by pitch and another walk. This was hardly Murderers’ Row, but it meant that the Nats would have to climb back into the game from a 6-1 deficit. Despite scoring two in the ninth (Ramos singled, Ankiel singled — and Ryan Zimmerman doubled), the deficit proved just too big to overcome.

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: The Rockies are eight games under .500, and you have to wonder why. There are teams in baseball who’d kill to have the middle of their line-up: Seth Smith, Carlos Gonzalez, Troy Tulowitzki and Todd Helton. But, while that daunting roster is what the Arizona Diamondbacks faced on April 1, it’s not what the Nationals faced yesterday . . .

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Chien-Ming Wang still isn’t ready for prime time. The former Yankee and new Nationals’ righthander struggled through five innings against the Braves yesterday, giving up seven hits and two runs through five innings — and the Nationals fell to Atlanta in the final game of their three game set, 6-4.

While Wang recovered from a shaky first inning (in which he gave up two runs), he had trouble in the fifth, which proved the key to the game. Wang threw wildly on a Brandon Beachy bleeder for a two base error, Jose “George” Constanza followed with a single and, after a force play and an out at the plate, Dan Uggla plated the two stranded runners (and himself) with a three run homer.

The Nats fought back, rapping out a four run sixth inning, with a walk by Danny Espinos, singles by Ryan Zimmerman and Michael Morse, a Beachy wild pitch and a Jayson Werth home run. But four runs weren’t enough to secure the victory. Despite the loss, pitching coach Steve McCatty was upbeat on Wang. “He had better sink,” McCatty said after the game. “The offspeed pitches were a little flat. He got hurt on that. If he makes a play in the fifth inning — no damage.”

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: Jason Marquis debuted for the Arizona Diamondbacks yesterday, and it didn’t go well. The former Nats’ righty gave up ten hits and seven runs over four innings, as the Snakes fell to the McCoveys, 8-1. Marquis wasn’t the only thing traded to Arizona; so too was the explanation for why he does poorly: his sinker wasn’t sinking . . .

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It’s quite possible that finally — five months into the 2011 baseball season — the Nationals have finally found their leadoff hitter. Batting in the first slot in the line-up last night, centerfield veteran Rick Ankiel blasted two home runs in leading the Nationals to a 5-3 victory over the Braves at Nationals Park. Ankiel’s homers allowed Livan Hernandez (six innings, six hits and three strikeouts) to walk away with his sixth win of the season.

Ankiel’s homers were only his fourth and fifth of the year and came in the first and the fifth inning — both off of usually reliable Braves’ starter Jair Jurrjens, who registered his fourth loss. Ankiel, who has been in and out of the line-up all year (and has struggled at the plate) seems finally to be swinging with authority. “You just look for a pitch to drive. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you make it happen, sometimes you don’t,” Ankiel said after the victory. “Lately, I’ve been making good contact and good things are happening.”

It’s too soon to tell whether Ankiel’s Monday night performance means that he will be an every game feature at the leadoff position, but Nats’ skipper Davey Johnson liked what he saw: “Now he [Ankiel] is [playing] and he has cut down on his strikeouts, his swings are better,” Johnson said. “That comes with playing. In the last couple of years, I don’t think he has played much.”

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: If either Pittsburgh or Cincinnati are to have a chance in the N.L. Central, they’re going to have to beat the teams behind them. Last night they didn’t. Newest Ahoy Derrek Lee celebrated his arrival in Pittsburgh with two home runs, but the Pirates couldn’t beat the no-account Cubs, suffering their fourth loss in a row by a 5-3 score. Catch ‘em while you can; they’re fading, and fast . . .

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There’s a reason why the Washington Nationals don’t like the Arizona’s Diamondbacks. Since the days of hotdogging Eric Byrnes, the D-Backs have been known as a showboating franchise with a nasty streak — and they proved it again during the just-concluded four game series with the Nationals.

While the Nationals were able to pull out a win in the 11th inning of the final game of the four game set (an inning that included a Michael Morse grand slam dinger), the series was noted for its HBP scoring notations: two hit batters in game one (Upton and Werth), Upton twice in game two, one  hit batter in game three (Werth, again) and five in game four (Upton, Werth, Morse and Espinosa — twice). By the end of the series detail-oriented scorers had notched nine unemotional HBPs in their books, with Upton being hit four times — and Werth three. Both teams anticipated a bench-clearing brawl (and it certainly would have cleared the air), but it never quite came.

The HBPs took their toll: by the time the final game had ended (nearly four-and-one-half hours after it began), Jason Marquis and D-Backs pitcher Esmerling Vasquez and both managers were ejected — and Justin Upton was being considered for an Oscar for his writhing reaction to a one-that-got-away pitch from Jason Marquis in the 6th.

On Saturday, Nats’ skipper Jim Riggleman, who probably saw this coming, rejected any Arizona contention that the Nats were targeting Upton: “I feel terrible that the same guy gets hit three times,” Riggleman said. “But clearly, the first night when he got hit, that put the tying run to the plate. Obviously, we don’t want that to happen.” The Diamondbacks didn’t believe him, so they targeted Werth in game four and, when they couldn’t get him, they went after Danny Espinosa.

The nasty plunking by both teams did little to offset a near-catastrophic Nationals loss in the final set-to: the Anacostia Nine were up 4-0 in the eighth, but the bullpen (with the lone exception of Tyler Clippard) couldn’t hold the lead. The Diamondbacks scored three in the bottom of the 9th (the result of an almost unheard of spate of just-a-little-outside wildness from Drew Storen), but the Nationals held off the Snakes in the 10th before scoring five on reliever Joe Paterson in the 11th.

A near disaster, then, for sure — but reminiscent in its own way (it’s a stretch, but if you could hum the theme for “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” right here, that might help) of any classic “Spaghetti Western,” where the good guy gets the nasty punk and rides off into the sunset: or in the case of the Nationals, onto a charter flight for California.

As it turned out, the Nationals scored runs when they needed them: with Wilson Ramos’ big bat coming through for a homer in the 8th, Roger Bernadina going 3-6, Danny Espinosa at 2-4 and and Morse’s blast in the 11th. The victory gave the Nationals a needed split in Phoenix, and they now head to San Francisco, where they face Timmy and the San Francisco McCoveys.

Jordan Zimmermann pitched solidly and steadily in the second game of a day-night doubleheader, but could not come away with a win, as the Washington Nationals dropped the third game of their set with the St. Louis Cardinals, 5-3. Zimmermann threw six complete innings, and while he gave up eight hits and five runs, he kept the Nats in the game. The Cardinals Jaime Garcia and the St. Louis bullpen (thought to be the Redbirds’ weak spot), pitched better: holding the Nationals to five hits and one earned run.

The St. Louis hero was Houston retread Lance Berkman, who collected two singles, a double and two RBIs. Baseball fans remain skeptical of St. Louis skipper Tony LaRussa’s decision to set Berkman down in right field, but Berkman was been the spark for a slow-starting Cardinals’ offense. Last night’s win over the Anacostia Nine continued that early-season tradition: “The ball doesn’t know how old you are or how much experience you’ve got,” Berkman said after the victory. The Nats are set to take on the Cardinals again today, for the final game of their four game series.

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: The big news in baseball is Bud Selig’s decision that Major League Baseball will take control of the day-to-day running of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Trolleys are in a heap of trouble — with the owner looking for ways to meet the payroll. This is the second time in three seasons that this has happened: Major League Baseball took over the Rangers when its owner (Tom Hicks) ran up debts. The Texas team was then (in January of 2010) sold to a consortium of business people that included Nolan Ryan. That was last year — the year the Rangers surprised baseball and ended up in the World Series. It’d be nice if this turned out as well . . .

Don Mattingly says that the takeover doesn’t really concern the team, which still has to play well, no matter who’s in the front office. Maybe they will, but it doesn’t seem likely. The Dodgers have been doing just fine on the field — but they’re not the same team that Joe Torre took into the playoffs in 2009, and (honestly) that team (despite the 95 wins) wasn’t all that great. The difference then, particularly with just an average starting staff (Wolf, Billingsley, Kershaw, Kuroda — none of them won more than 12 games), was Torre, who stepped into retirement just as things headed south. We’re just saying . . .

So, where are the vaunted Dodgers? They have a team ERA of 4.66 (that’s fourteenth in the National League), are fourteenth in runs scored (well behind the Nationals, by the bye), and are tenth in team batting average. In the only stat that matters, they trail Colorado, San Francisco and Arizona in the N.L. West and are one-half game ahead of the Friars. Ugh. There are notable bright spots: Jon Garland is throwing ground ball outs (he made the Braves look sick last night), Clayton Kershaw is still one of the league’s premier lefties, Hiroki Kuroda has an ERA of 3.33 (and has turned into a downright frightening pitcher), Matt Kemp is hitting a torrid .426, and Andre Ethier is underrated (and batting .384). You would think Donnie could do something with that . . .

The key is probably Kemp — and for Trolley fans that’s definitely not good news. The outfielder is prone to forgetting exactly where he is and is hardly a clubhouse leader. We can put some of this down to his off-field distractions, which might have caused Kemp’s in-season troubles last year (faster than a speeding bullet, he stole 19 bases in 34 attempts . . . not great). Once upon a time former Dodger coach Larry Bowa (not exactly Sigmund Freud, is our bet) attempted to do an intervention with Matthew (something no one, we imagine, might want), but even that didn’t work. “He’s wound pretty tight,” Torre said of Kemp before departing L.A.

There’s a pattern here somewhere, let’s see if we can guess what it is. L.A.’s financial problems date from the owner’s very public divorce — with the team split between former husband and former wife. Frank (McCourt) even accused Jamie (McCourt) of having an affair, and fired her from her position with the team. Ugly. Really ugly. So ugly that it has spilled a lot of ink, ink better spent talking about runs and outs. There’s even a blog for Trolley fans called Dodger Divorce. And Kemp? Kemp’s 2010 spiral coincided with his focus elsewhere. Wags say, well . . . ah . . . they say that now that that’s done, Kemp can worry about baseball, instead of giving new meaning to the term “good with the stick.”

What a mess.

The Washington Nationals are now 1-4 and have lost three in a row. After a good start on Wednesday night in Florida (the Nats took a 4-0 lead on the solid pitching of Livan Hernandez), the Nationals fell to the Marlins, 7-4. The game was a symbol of what Washington seems to do so well: after innings of good starting pitching, the Nationals bats fell silent, the opposition was let back into the game, and the bullpen was less than stellar. Reason to panic? Not according to Nationals’ players: skipper Jim Riggleman said after the game that the clubhouse was still positive and that it was only a matter of time before the Nats break out. True enough, it’s still early — right? Right?

It’s not a secret, the hole in the Nats team is the starting pitching: the relief core is solid, the team should be able to hit. But in the early going, the bullpen has struggled — and key players bats are silent. Chad Gaudin and Todd Coffey’s ERA is soaring, and even the best arms seem tentative. Adam LaRoche, Michael Morse and Rick Ankiel are looking up at the Mendoza line, hitting .158, 118 and .133 respectively. Of course, or so the argument goes, we can expect that the Nats are going to have trouble getting on track so long as they face the Marlins, Riggleman told Mark Zuckerman. “You have to start feeling that you’ve got to put these guys away when you have an opportunity,” the manager said. “They’ve got a good group there, and they’ve had their way with us for a couple years now. There’s nothing to do but battle your way out of it and bust open a ballgame to where they can’t come back.”

I’d Rather Eat Glass Than Hear Another Word About The Phillies: While baseball is oohing and ahhing about Philadelphia’s Phab Phour, let’s try to remember that the San Francisco Giants are the champions of the world. Last night they showed why: the Giants sent the Padres packing 8-4 behind the pitching of (who else?) Tim Lincecum. Lincecum was at his best, holding the Friars to three hits in seven innings: he struck out 13. He struck out 13. So while there’s all this talk about Halliday, Lee, Oswalt, and Hamels (as, I suppose, there should be), Lincecum is still the best pitcher in baseball. Yeah, yeah, yeah — but what about Halliday? Well, what about him?

For all of the sturm and drung about the NL East, it’s still the NL Least — the NL West is the tougher division. By far. Check the facts: the NL West has supplied two World Series teams in the last five years, the Rockies and Giants, the West has provided the NL’s best pitching staffs in three of the last five years (Dodgers, Padres and Giants), and nine of the last 12 Cy Young winners have come from the NL West (that’s unbelievable, when you think about it). Sure, there’s the Phab Phour in Philly (and a tough but, let’s admit, not a great staff in Atlanta), but the NL West has a top-flight rotation in San Fran and nothing to sneeze at in Los Angeles, Colorado and San Diego. Name one Atlanta starter who’s as good as Ubaldo Jimenez. Yeah, okay: Tim Hudson and Derek Lowe are savvy, but that’s because they have to be — their fastballs are Ubaldo’s change-up.

That’s just a part of it. While anyone and their mother can pick the Phillies to win the NL East, you have to flip a coin when it comes to the West. “No more division has been more hotly contest over the past five years,” Sport Illustrated noted in its baseball preview issue. No one would be totally shocked if the Padres came close again this year — a reminder to those who thought they’d be the worst team in baseball in ’10. No division in baseball has had tighter races (since ’06 no one has won the West by more than two games), and the West has more one run games than anyone else. So . . . so, Lincecum, Cain, Sanchez and Bumgarner don’t sound like Halliday, Lee, Oswalt and Hamels, but they were good enough last year to win it all — and the Giants have Brian Wilson. And the Phillies have . . . well, they’ll let us know. The Giants are slow out of the gate, but last night’s ho-hummer in Friarland is a reminder that San Francisco remains the team to beat.

If there’s a way to feel good about a great, but ultimately lost season, baseball fans have yet to find it. San Diego’s fans must be feeling this today, after their Friars dropped the season finale in San Francisco that put them out of the playoffs — and added an unpredicted and painful coda to their otherwise unpredicted and surprising season. In the end, and ironically, the thing that made the 2010 Padres the miraculous and unpredicted success of the season failed them: Mat Latos could not finish out the San Francisco Giants, and the McCoveys (and not the Friars) will go into the off-season.

The McCoveys pulled out a decisive 3-0 win in the season’s final game to put them into the Final Eight, but it was Latos’ season, and his last five losses, that are likely to be remembered in San Diego. With a dominant lead in the N.L. West, and with the Giants struggling to manufacture runs, the Friars seemed to have all but cinched the division. It was not to be: a heart-rending late season death spiral brought the Giants nearly even (and a surging Colorado within striking distance), and put pressure on San Diego’s starting staff in one-on-one tilt with one of baseball’s best starting three: Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez. Outside of San Diego (where loyalty to the little brown monks is a  . . .  well, a religion), there isn’t a baseball fan in America who, given that line-up, would have picked the Padres.

In the wake of the disappointing loss, San Diego baseball writers cited the young 22-year-old’s maturity, his shrugging acceptance of his fate. What a guy, they said. And Latos acted and talked like a major leaguer, admitting to the injustice of it all — but then, it’s not kosher to cry in public. “It’s unfortunate that I went 0-5 in September, the time that we needed it the most,” Latos said. “It just makes me hungrier for next year. I’m going to go back and look at video in the offseason and just try to progress. You can never stay ahead of the game of baseball, but I’ll just look back at what I need to do and make some personal tweaks.” Enough then: the Padres are out and the Giants are in. Which means that baseball fans could be treated (in a prospective NLCS match-up) to a head-to-head competition of the two best pitching staffs in baseball: Halladay & Company vs. Tim Lincecum and his band of merry fireballers. Don’t bet against the Giants.