Washington and the Rockies rapped out 33 hits in scoring 22 runs on Saturday — but the Heltons were just too powerful and downed the Nationals, 15-7. This was a poor outing for Livan Hernandez (now 6-11 on the year) who gave up nine hits and seven runs in just 3.2 innings.

The big bats of Colorado showed up in force: Carlos Gonzalez and Troy Tulowitzki were a combined 5-8, while normally light hitting catcher Chris Iannetta was 4-5. The Nationals bullpen was also ineffective. Tom Gorzelanny, Todd Coffey, Sean Burnett and Henry Rodriguez gave up a combined ten hits in 4.2 innings of work.

The Nationals fought back in the top of the sixth, scoring four runs to bring the game to within three, at 10-7. It was the only strong point of the Washington showing. “I was really pleased with the team,” skipper Davey Johnson said, after the loss. “We battled back and scored a bunch of runs with two outs, and that was a good sign. Stuff like that happens here.”

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: The Cincinnati Reds were swept by the Mets at the end of July, but then took three of three from the Giants — a sure sign the team was still in the thick of the N.L. Central race. But since then the Redlegs have tanked. They dropped two of three from the Astros and have now dropped two in a row to the Cubs . . .

They look awful. Yesterday in Chicago (which has a seven game winning streak, though no one knows exactly why), Dusty Baker’s boys were eaten by Carlos Zambrano, who gave up six hits in six innings and homered off Johnny Cueto in the second inning. Zambrano (whose homer was a straight-away-to-center shot), is now 9-6 . . . Cueto couldn’t make it out of the fourth . . .

(more…)

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 . . .

(more…)

Once upon a time, and not so terribly long ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks were the class of the National League. And for good reason — the Snakes had the best pitching staff in baseball (anchored by Brandon Webb and Dan Haren), a quality innings eater with a history of winning (former Fish Livan Hernandez) a group of fast, punch-and-judy hitters (Orlando Hudson and Stephen Drew), a classic high strikeouts player with punch and panache (Mark Reynolds) and a faster-than-spit closer (Jose Valverde) who was the envy of major league baseball. Plus (plus!), the D-Backs had a solid philosophy of winning, based on the foundation that had brought them a World Series Championship in 2001: the club would focus on pitching, pitching, pitching (Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling anchored the staff in ’01), and build a strong farm system based on development and scouting. But those days are gone. The Diamondbacks of 2010 are 23 games back of the Friars and the face of the franchise, savvy righty Dan Haren, is living in Los Angeles. So what happened?

Injuries happened — and overspending. Brandon Webb hasn’t pitched in forever and is still attempting to recover from shoulder surgery (his arm still hurts, but he’s agreed to pitch out of the bullpen), Mark Reynolds and Justin Upton have been on-and-off the DL with a series of nagging everyday bumps and bruises, D-Backs President Derrick Hall and Interim General Manager Jerry DiPoto are still living with the effects of their predecessors’ decision to hand Showboat Eric Byrnes a three year $30 million paycheck — one of the worst contract decisions made in D-Backs history — and the farm system was plundered for short term satisfaction and is devoid of any perceivable talent. Worse yet, the once can’t-get-enough-of-baseball Phoenix fanbase has been dribbling away, making a $75 million player payroll untenable. The result has been a classic baseball fire sale, albeit one that began long before the trading deadline, and had nothing to do with players. Manager A.J. Hinch was tossed on the scrapheap on the night of July 1 and G.M. Josh Byrnes was disposed of 24 hours later. The firings signaled the beginning of a trend: the Diamondbacks wouldn’t just be sellers at the trading deadline (and before), they were dedicated to taking the team apart and starting over.

You can hardly blame Arizona fans for being skeptical. The current DiPoto salary dump looks as desperate as Byrnes’s decision to denude the D-Backs farm system two years ago — when Scott Hairston and Alberto Callaspo were shipped off for relief pitcher no-accounts (and Valverde’s salary was embarrassingly dumped) and Brett Anderson and Carlos Gonzalez (a curse, now, on Arizona pitching — in Colorado) were shipped to Oakland to land Haren. Earlier this year Byrnes attempted to compensate for these sins by sending Max Scherzer and Daniel Schlereth to Detroit for Edwin Jackson and Ian Kennedy (a good swap by any standard), but the trade came way too late to silence the rising chorus of critics who noted that dumping young talent almost never works.

While skepticism about the Rattlers’ future is in order, Arizona fans can be thankful that their franchise’s tradition of trading for and developing young pitching seems to be intact. While DiPoto received good value for Haren (Joe Saunders is no slouch) and simply cast off catcher Chris Snyder for three below average players (one of whom, Ryan Church, I wouldn’t let in my outfield), his decision to buy Edwin Jackson a ticket to Chicago for Daniel Hudson (below, pitching against “the Kings of Queens”) is paying immediate dividends: the young righty (nearly a Nationals’ property, in a proposed trade for Adam Dunn), threw a gem against the Amazins, whose death spiral (“trades? sorry — we’ll play these”) is now nearly an established fact. Hudson looks like he’s in the Diamondbacks’ rotation to stay after throwing eight innings of three hit ball — a game that, by itself, is far better than any that Danny Haren threw all year. Sure, the Diamondbacks look like a mess and, yes, there’s likely to be more moves in Arizona in the offseason. But the arrival of Hudson, when coupled with the promise of a developing Ian Kennedy, holds hope for the future. In truth, the Diamondbacks of 2010 look now like the D-Backs of 1999. That team, an embarrassing but young mess, was just two years from a world championship.

You can be sure that the Oakland Athletics rue the day they traded outfield prospect Carlos Gonzalez to the Colorado Rockies. The 24-year-old Venezuelan has forged a torrid path to the top of the NL’s list of “most promising young outfielders,” hitting above .320 for most of the season and providing badly needed stability in the Rockies’ outfield. And while Gonzalez was only 2-8 in Colorado’s double tilt against the Nats on Saturday, his ten total bases were more than worrying: every time a Nats pitcher turned around there he was, dancing off some base. So while the narrative of the Nats double loss in Colorado on Saturday may rightly focus on the Livan Hernandez-Ubaldo Jimenez pitcher’s duel in the first game and the follow-on skittish play of a young Nats infield in the second, it’s hard for Nats fans to shake the feeling that if Luis Atilano had pitched Gonzalez a little closer in the third inning of the second tilt, “CarGo” would not have lifted one of his pitches (his fourth of the year) into the seats. The Gonzalez homer in the second game set up a three run third inning that made the Nats fight from behind for the rest of the night.

The twin losses in Colorado on Saturday put a pause on the endless praise for the Nats starting rotation. The starting five of Hernandez, Stammen, Lannan, Atilano and Olsen have been better than expected (in fact, much better than expected), but other teams in other divisions are as good — and, in some cases, much better. It’s hard to take issue with Colorado’s entry into these pitching sweepstakes. While Colorado fans (and the Rockies’ front office) are critical of Jason Hammel’s 2010 showing (and his 7.71 ERA), it’s awfully difficult to criticize Hammel for what he did against the Nats on Saturday, giving up three runs over seven innings in a steady, if unspectacular, outing. If Hammel can build off of that success the Helton’s will boast a rotation of Jimenez, Cook, Chacin, Hammel and a returning Jeff Francis — once one of the best young left handers in the game. Then too, Colorado is awaiting the return of closer Huston Street (who arrived in Denver, with Gonzalez, in that trade with the White Elephants) and Jorge De La Rosa — the hero of Colorado’s second half comeback in 2009. The Friars and McCovey’s currently lead the NL West, but if Francis returns to form and Street and De La Rosa pick up where they left off, the Rockies will be there in September.

Those Are The Headlines, Now For The Details: Nats’ lefty Sean Burnett was visibly irritated last Monday after Jim Riggleman lifted him after he’d pitched to one batter in Washington’s 3-2 win in New York. The former Ahoy had pitched sparingly up to that point, apparently viewed as a lefty-on-lefty specialist. But since then, Burnett has been one of Washington’s featured relievers. On Saturday, Burnett threw two innings in relief of Atilano (his longest outing of the year) and has lowered his ERA a full point over the last seven days. You have to wonder if Burnett said something to Riggleman. Something like “Hey skipper — do you really think I’m less effective than Brian Bruney? . . .

Not only is the right field platoon of Willie Harris and Willy Taveras a thing of the past, so too is Willy Taveras. The veteran outfielder was designated for assignment on Saturday, and has to decide whether to accept the assignment or file for free agency. He said he would let the team know after talking to his family. The Harris-Taveras platoon (which ended even before it began) will be replaced by a Roger Bernadina-Mike Morse platoon, but our bet here at CFG is that that won’t last either. If Bernadina stops hitting (and, quite frankly, he probably will), the job will be given to Morse, a former Mariner and Riggleman favorite. Morse has been out since April with a left calf strain.

On the day that Mike Rizzo shed the title “acting,” the Washington Nationals dropped their third straight to the Colorado Rockies, scoring only eight runs in the three game series. The Nats’ quiet bats took second spot to Rizzo’s reclamation, a “just dues” naming of a man who had recast the Nats floundering Dominican scouting infrastructure, stepped in for humiliated G.M. Jim Bowden, traded head-case Lasting Milledge for the team’s regular centerfielder, revamped the Nats embarrassing bullpen, replaced manager Manny Acta with interim manager Jim Riggleman, and signed baseball’s first overall pick, Stephen Strasburg. Rizzo was named G.M. on the basis of his work as interim G.M., a source with the ballclub said on Thursday.

Team president Stan Kasten had nothing but praise for Rizzo: “In March, we had the turmoil that we had,” Kasten said. “We asked Mike to step in, and every job that needed [to be] done got handled flawlessly. Since that time, all Mike has done is gain respect from everyone in our organization, all the fans in D.C. and baseball people throughout the country.” What may well be Rizzo’s most important accomplishment will be on display on Friday, as first overall pick Stephen Strasburg appears at Nationals Park to answer questions from fans and reporters. On Thursday, Rizzo outlined the goals that he had for the team in his new position: “We understand that we have a young talented rotation,” Rizzo said. “We need an anchor at the top, some type of veteran starting pitcher. My philosophy is speed and defense, especially up the middle — have your big bats in the corners. We are going to take that into account. We have to stabilize a bullpen that has not performed up to standard.”

The good news on Rizzo did not help the Nats against the Rockies on Thursday night. Despite Garrett Mock’s solid outing (five innings, 3 hits and eight strikeouts), the Nats were outdueled by Colorado starter Jason Hammel, who gave the Rockies seven innings of three-hit ball. Colorado’s scoring was once again led by Rockies’ rookie Carlos Gonzalez — who was particularly effective against the Nats during the three game series. The Rockies head home to face the San Francisco Giants, with whom they are tied in the race for the NL Wild Card spot.

Garrett Mock was solid on Thursday (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)