Light-hitting Donnie Murphy took a Collin Balester offering deep into the bullpen in the 13th inning on Saturday, leading the Florida Marlins to a 4-1 victory over the Nationals at Nationals Park. The Murphy homer ended a solid string of relief innings for the Nats’ bullpen, accounting for the second straight loss to the Marlins in as many nights.

Once again, the Nationals could not seem to find a way to hit Marlins’ pitching — scattering six hits over 13, and scoring just once. The lone piece of good news at the plate came when Nationals’ catcher Wilson Ramos connected in the fifth inning off of Chris Volstad for his thirteenth home run of the year.

Of course, the big news of the night was the start of Stephen Strasburg, who pitched brilliantly through six innings, giving up four hits, striking out three, and walking none. Strasburg’s outing provided further evidence that the young righty is on track for a solid 2012, and is continuing his successful rehabilitation from Tommy John surgery.

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: The Phillies clinched their fifth straight N.L. East title with a 9-2 laugher over the St. Louis Cardinals. That the Phillies captured the flag is hardly a surprise, as their victory on Saturday showed. Roy Oswalt threw seven and struck out seven, with Shane Victorino and Raul Ibanez homering . . .

While everyone is tuned into the Rays-Red Sox match-up in Boston, the San Francisco Giants have been quietly sneaking up on the Diamondbacks. Last night, the McCoveys held off the Rockies for their seventh straight, while Arizona fell to the Friars. But Arizona’s lead might be too big to overcome: they lead the Giants by five games with ten to play . . .

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This is the kind of pitching staff the Washington Nationals are working for: an imposing and overpowering young right hander with a lights-out fastball, a young kid with a a deep hook and a electric stuff, a veteran righty who knows his way around the league and can provide the stability needed to anchor a young staff — and complementary fourth and fifth starters who can come up with enough wins to put the team into the playoffs. That is to say, it’s just the kind of pitching staff that the Florida Marlins damn near already have. Josh Johnson (a six-foot-seven bundle of intimidation) is Florida’s top fastball hurler, the struggling Chris Volstad (taller than Johnson at 6-8) has a fair hook complemented by a good outside fastball, savvy (though now injured) veteran Ricky Nolasco, Anabal Sanchez (a block of granite compared to Johnson and Volstad), who might well be the most talented pitcher on the team (and the sit-em-on-the-bench winner on Saturday) and then two others: the still-developing Alex Sanabia and (lest we forget), lefty Andrew Miller, who is still learning his trade.

There’s little doubt — the Marlins aren’t there, at least not yet. But the formula they have adopted looks a lot like the one promoted by Mike Rizzo, of drafting young arms and developing them, and then surrounding them with home-grown young players (Ryan Zimmerman) and the odd here-or-there free agent boppers (Adam Dunn). And for Florida it’s worked, despite their struggles to find a consistency that would translate into a division championship — and despite the spate of August aches and pains that have taken them out of the race to the flag. It’s true: the combination of Johnson, Nalasco, Sanchez, Volstad and Miller, looks pretty good to a team like the Mets or Brewers who are struggling to find starting pitching, and have only a handful of arms  in the minor leagues.That’s not true for the Marlins, whose pitching staff is the envy of nearly everyone in baseball.

Can the Nats successfully mimic the Marlins’ model? Well, they’re trying, and remain confident that in 2012 (or, perhaps, with luck — next year) the team will boast a rotation that provides two top of the rotation fastballers (the Josh Johnson-like Stephen Strasburg — in 2012 — and Jordan Zimmermann), a developing finesse righty (Yunesky Maya) a steady lefty or two (John Lannan and perhaps Scott Olsen), a pair of savvy veteran arms (Jason “I’m back” Marquis and Livan Hernandez) and a welter of kids competing to fill-in-the-blanks: Ross Detwiler, Collin Balester (or even) Ryan Tatusko or (you never know) Tanner Roark — who, since being traded from the Rangers, sports a stellar 2.50 in 36 innings for Harrisburg this year. It’s all speculation, of course, but the Stan Kasten/Mike Rizzo philosophy of drafting young hurlers and then, and only then, surrounding them with needed pieces works. It just takes patience.

There are lots of Nats’ fans who think that Nyjer Morgan has a screw loose — but his scrum in Miami last night (perhaps, as one reader writes, “he misses hockey”), makes for exciting baseball. And it shows that the Nats (first in war, first in peace and still last in the NL Least) have a bit of life left in them. Nats’ manager Jim Riggleman defended Morgan, particularly after the Marlins took umbrage with his decision to steal second and third with the Nats down ten runs — a no-no that’s considered a cheapy in baseball’s Book of Unwritten Rules. Of course, not everyone agrees with that, in part because no one has ever actually seen the book — but because the “rule” is a bunch of hooey. “My feeling has always been, if you hit somebody, you did what you set out to do,” Nats skipper Jim Riggleman said after the game. “If he decides to run on you, that’s his business. I have no problem with that at all. We decide when we run. The Florida Marlins don’t decide when we run. Nobody decides when we run.”

The Miami melee began after, having already been hit once (the result of Nyjer’s decking of the Marlins’ catcher on a play at the plate on Tuesday), Florida starter Chris Volstad threw behind the Nats’ center fielder. Morgan charged the mound and in the ensuing one-on-one (Morgan threw a roundhouse left at Volstad, as both benches emptied), Marlins’ first baseman Gaby Sanchez clothes-lined the Curacao native. “When I saw [Morgan] running out, obviously, he’s not coming out there to talk,” Volstad said. “I was just trying to defend myself and not get hurt. Gaby had my back. The whole team had my back. Everyone was there. It’s just part of the game.” The fight (and Morgan’s decking of Marlins catcher Brett Hayes), resulted in six ejections (Jim Riggleman and reliever Doug Slaten were ejected later in the game — after Slaten plunked cheap-shot artist Gaby Sanchez) and will likely result in suspensions and fines for those most involved.

The Marlins say the bad blood between the teams is now behind them (“I know it’s over for me,” Marlins third sacker Wes Helms said. “I hope it is for these other guys”), but there’s bound to be some lingering irritations — the Nats and Marlins play regularly as N.L. East rivals, and neither Morgan nor Sanchez are the forgive-and-forget types. In the wake of the dust-up, Nats’ commentators were quick to criticize Morgan. Mark Zuckerman said we all should have seen this coming, and described Morgan’s behavior over the last two weeks as “sad and predictable.” Ben Goessling, meanwhile, speculates that it’s all but inevitable that the Nats will part with Morgan. Goessling adds, correctly we think, that Morgan brings an energy to the game that the Nats need. FJB says that “Nyjer needs to go” while Dan Steinberg points out that one of Morgan’s less endearing traits is his tendency to jaw with fans.

All of that is undoubtedly true: Nyjer Morgan can’t be allowed to carry on a dialogue with fans and Riggleman was right to bench him for purposely and unnecessarily elbowing the Cards catcher here in D.C. last week. And despite Zuckerman’s correct judgment (that we should have seen this coming — and we did), there’s need for a little perspective: it’s not a given that Morgan’s collision with Hayes was intended to injure (it probably wasn’t) and Nyjer took his medicine when he was hit the first time by Volstad (he had it coming and he knew it — and trotted to first with nary a second thought). But a second attempt to plunk the plucky center fielder is over the line — as Jim Riggleman, holding a single digit and yelling “one time” at the Marlins manager — showed. And Gaby Sanchez’s clotheslining (which brought oohs and ahhs from the Marlins’ clubhouse) of Morgan is not a sign of Sanchez’s fighting prowess, it was a cheap and thuggish blindside shot. Doug Slaten figured that out, and responded. And rightly so.

Washingtonians have short memories. Last year nearly everyone (including MASN’s Bob Carpenter and his dearly departed sidekick) were telling us how crappy a player Alberto Gonzalez was — this year we can’t get enough of him. Austin Kearns was the fair-haired boy when he came here from hog heaven, but lost his fans when he snapped a tendon and tried to play through it. Remember? We couldn’t get enough of Nyjer last year, when he was the best Nats player in September and ignited a team that didn’t look like it cared. And while we can roll our eyes at Morgan’s “Tony Plush” put-on, he is (by all accounts) a tough team player who wants to win. Now we’re all calling for his head. And why? Because he did this last week what Pete Rose did his entire career. So — yeah — the Nats will part ways with Nyjer this winter, but they shouldn’t do it before then and they shouldn’t do it because he bangs into opponents while playing the game. They should do it for the right reason: because Roger Bernadina is a better hitter and a better fielder. Give me a break: teams don’t win because they are filled with good citizens, they win because they have good players.

The Nats were reportedly displeased with their play over their last two days in Miami (“We’re definitely upset,” Willie Harris admitted. “We’re not like in the past, where you might think it’s just another ballgame. It’s different), but the truth is that, while the Nats could have played much better, they lost to two tough pitchers and a team of suddenly surging long ball hitters. It’s sometimes just this simple: the other team plays better and the guys they put on the mound are in command of their stuff. So it was on Saturday, when Chris Volstad’s knuckle curve subdued the Nats order, stifling a confident team in a visitor’s park. Which is simply to say: the Nats ran into a team that boasts pitchers who know how to throw complete games. The Marlins are tied with the Phillies for most complete games — having turned in complete performances from Volstad (who held the Nats to just four hits) Ricky Nolasco (beaten by Scott Olsen on Friday) and Josh Johnson — who was in complete command on Sunday.

Which is not to say that the Nats played (or pitched) well — they didn’t. Craig Stammen remained inconsistent through four innings on Saturday, pulled early by Riggleman when it was clear that he simply didn’t have his stuff. After two good outings, Stammen seemed to slip back to his old ways: serving up batting practice fastballs to a group of hitters who knew exactly what to do with them. John Lannan endured the same kind of outing on Sunday, though this time the Nats looked a little less like the defensive bumblers of ’09. Pitching was still the problem — Lannan gave up nine hits through five shaky innings and the bullpen wasn’t much better, with Brian Bruney as ineffective behind Lannan as Tyler Walker had been behind Stammen. Bruney was puzzled by his continued struggles: “Really, honestly, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said following the Marlins Sunday win. “I think you can just jumble everything together and say it’s frustrating.”

Chris Volstad is an imposing presence on the mound (6-8, 225), with a pitcher-heavy fastball and a smooth delivery. But his best pitch is a “knuckle curve” — what some players call a “spike curve.” Oddly, it (and not the fastball) is Volstad’s out pitch (or at least it was on Saturday) and when he throws it well (as he did against the Nats), he’s damn near unhittable. The knuckle curve features a semi-curve ball grip with one or two fingers curled back. To be effective, the ball is launched or pushed towards the plate instead of thrown. The master of the knuckle curve was Burt Hooton, a Texas phenom who pitched fifteen years for the Cubs, Dodgers and Astros. Hooton was the “next big thing” when he arrived in Chicago in 1971 — one of the few MLB players to vault from college directly into a team’s starting line-up.

For a time in Chicago, Hooton looked like the real deal. He struck out 15 in one of his earliest appearances in 1971 and in his first outing in ’72 he threw a breathtaking no-hitter against the Phillies. But Hooton struggled with the Cubs the rest of the way and was dealt to L.A. in 1975. Hooton was 19-8 for the Trolleys in 1978, his best year. In 1981, Hooton was named the NLCS MVP for his stellar pitching performances against the Expos and went on to pitch well against the Yankees in the ’81 World Series. But while Hooton was the master of the knuckle curve, he was never the master of the strike zone — and never equaled in his later career the lights-out promise of his 1972 no-hitter. Hooton has served as a pitching coach in the Astro’s organization since his retirement and, in 2009, was inducted into the University of Texas Hall of Fame, along with Astro’s slugger Lance Berkman.