Ubaldo Jimenez looked like his old self on Saturday night, holding the Nationals to just five hits and one run in eight innings — and notching a 2-1 win for his Colorado Rockies. Jimenez, who is suffering through a 4-8 season and an unusually high (4.14) ERA, looked like the Ubaldo Jimenez of last year, when his up-in-the-eyes fastball was the talk of the league. The Nationals loss, meanwhile, squandered a solid outing from former Rockies’ hurler Jason Marquis, who toughed out six innings, giving up two runs to the often run-starved Heltons.

Despite Jimenez’s dazzling performance, the Nationals were within 90 feet of tying the game and a long bomb away from winning it. But slumping star Jayson Werth couldn’t keep the ball out of the glove of shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who turned a double play to end the game. Werth, who is mired in a season-long slump, has been booed by Nationals’ fans this year, but no more so than on Saturday, as he stood beyond first after hitting into his game ending double play.

But for Washington, the problem was not Werth — it was the Rockies’ staring pitcher. “He’s filthy,” Johnson said of Jimenez. “He’s one of the best pitchers in the league. We’ve been swinging the bats pretty good, but he calmed us down quite a bit. I think we outhit them, just couldn’t score.”

The Nationals loss marked their third loss in a row — all of them by one run. That mini-streak had been preceded by three wins, all of them also by one run. “Right now, we’re living and dying by the one-run game,” shortstop Ian Desmond, who was 2-3 with a triple, noted. “These one-run games are just flukes. It’s one of those things, but it will turn around for us.”

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The MLB Network preview of the Washington Nationals (a part of the 30 teams in 30 days series), repeated a well-known mantra: despite all the attention on Stephen Strasburg, Bryce Harper and new Nat Jayson Werth, the heart of the franchise has been — and still is — Ryan Zimmerman. This morning’s Washington Post reflected that reality, featuring an Adam Kilgore offering on how much Zimmerman loves the Nats — and how much they need to show that they love him. This isn’t some kind of fantasy: Zimmerman is one of baseball’s elite; his status set is in concrete by five years of solid numbers, including a 2009 campaign in which he hit .292 with 33 home runs.

The Nats need a lot of pieces to contend — another pitcher (or two), better defense up-the-middle, another heavy hitting outfielder — but the simple truth is that the team depends on Zimmerman; it’s possible to finish in last place with him, but it’s impossible to finish anywhere else without him. 2008 might be the best example. The Nats were going to finish in last place that year in any event, but a Zimmerman injury doomed the team to a listless summer — and plummeting attendance figures. Before his departure for Chicago, Adam Dunn was a centerpiece of the Nats, but fans didn’t come to see him play. They came to see Zimmerman. That’ll still be the case this year, even with Jayson Werth in tow.

While Kilgore says there’s no rush to finalize a new Zimmerman contract, there’s little doubt the Mike Rizzo & Company are anxious to keep him in the fold. It’ll be expensive, somewhere in the range of $200 million. But it could be worse. If the Nats don’t focus on signing Zim now, Kilgore says, “he could command closer to $300 million.” That’s a number that would give any owner pause (the owners in St. Louis, for instance), but it’s hard to believe that actually trading Zimmerman before he becomes a free agent would yield equal value. Which means that, beginning in just a few days, Nats fans will not only be treated to the start of another season of baseball, they’ll also be entertained by continuing talk of when and how the front office will begin negotiations with a player who defines the team.

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: SI wag Tom Verducci weighs in this week with a number of interesting entries — including Baltimore’s epic struggle to make vunderkind Matt Wieters a better hitter. “His bat is too slow through the zone,” Verducci quotes one major league scout as saying. “It just drags.” Really? This sounds a little like buyers’ remorse. After years of plumping the 6-5 backstop, the Orioles are now worried that he won’t hit like Joe Mauer. Enough already: the Birds spent years with the execrable Ramon Hernandez behind the plate, a guy who looked like he was spending every game learning the position . . . Verducci also entertains us with a dit on the top selling jerseys in the major leagues: Jeter, Mauer, Halladay, Utley, Lee, Pujols, Hamilton, Pedroia, Rodriguez, and Lincecum. Verducci points out that outside of Lincecum, there isn’t a West Coast player in the whole bunch. So, is there an East Coast bias in baseball? Maybe, but I have to believe that if Halladay played for the Dodgers, he’d still be ranked third. We should take this with a pinch of salt: the Dodgers trailed only the Yankees and Red Sox in sales of sport merchandise last year.

Texas lefty Cliff Lee should know: Washington is a great place to settle down and raise your kids, a wonderful city filled with monuments and parks and good restaurants. As for the high cost of living, the Lerners should be able to take care of that. While free agency is still a long ways off, on Monday night in New York, Cliff Lee showed why he’s not only the premier free agent pitcher for 2011, but the best southpaw in baseball. In eight innings of work, Lee gave up just two hits, struck out 13 and held the Yankees scoreless over eight innings in hurling the Texas Rangers into a 2-1 game lead in the ALCS. “Awesome,” Texas outfielder Nelson Cruz said. “It’s unbelievable … he’s pitching at the highest level possible.” Lee threw 122 pitches, 82 of them for strikes, in taming the Yankee line-up. This was no fluke — Lee struck out Derek Jeter three times and Mark Teixeira twice and was so dominating that Rangers’ hitters were almost a sidelight. Still, the Rangers accounted for eight runs in routing the Empire, as Josh Hamilton (2-5, two RBIs) and Michael Young (3-5, .400 in the post season) showed why they’re among the most dangerous hitters in baseball. “This is one of those games you try to forget about as soon as possible,” Yankee captain Jeter said after the Texas win.

If the Washington Nationals were to play 162 games against the Atlanta Braves they might have a shot at a division title. The Nats dominance of the Tomahawks continued on Sunday, as Livan Hernandez (aided by a clutch single in the 7th from rookie shortstop Ian Desmond), won the second game of a three game tilt against the Braves — and notched their tenth win in 18 tries against the Atlanta Nine. The Braves must think they’re snake bit: the Nationals have dominated the Braves in 2010, the only team they seem to play well against. Hernandez was his normal masterful self in throwing six innings of two run baseball — though he left the game tied. His ERA now stands at a respectable 3.73 for the season, as he solidified his 2010 legacy as the best starter on a shaky Nats’ staff. Desmond’s hit in the seventh was the difference, scoring Willie Harris and Danny Espinosa.

Past A Diving Scutaro: The Red Sox-Yankees match-up in New York last night was a classic example of late season drama, as well as a kind of petri dish for what ails The Nation. The game seemed well in hand for Boston until the ninth, the result of an unusually strong start from the normally shaky Daisuke Matsuzaka, who gave the Bosox eight innings of four hit ball. This was not only Dice-K’s best season outing, it might well have been the best performance of his career. True: the former Saitama Seibu Lions star (btw: the Lions were saved from bankruptcy by Boston bucks shelled out for a look-see at Dice-K) had help from the otherwise brilliant Mariano Rivera in the top of the 9th. The normally shut-the-door closer collapsed against a patient Boston line-up, who victimized the Yanks with dink and dunk singles and four steals. The Red Sox plated two runs and went into the last half-frame with a 3-2 lead. When the wind whipped up and it began to rain, Yankees fans streamed from the park — the game was over, finished, lost.

Drum roll: In ambled Jonathan Papelbon to shut down the Yankees line-up in the ninth. It’s not like the Steinbrenners were shaking in their boots: you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you don’t need a scouting report to tell you to sit on Johnny’s splitter. Which is precisely what the batsmen for The Empire did, vengefully dinking and dunking the closer’s right-down-Broadway fastballs and happily banking his not-even-close free passes . . . and knotting the game at 3. Here was Papelbon’s no account (I-wish-my-splitter-actually-worked) line: single (Swisher), single (Teixeira), steal (Nunez), walk (Rodriguez) and single — Robinson Cano. With the game actually on the line, Papelbon threw like Dick Raditz, inducing a Posada strike out and Berkman fly. Too late.

When the Red Sox went quietly in the 10th, the game’s result seemed fated. “Francoma” had seen enough of Papelbon, and brought in Hideki Okajima (the pride of Kyoto) to face the Yanks in the 10th — inducing metaphorical teeth gnashing in the rain-soaked northeast. But the Red Sox made it interesting: after Curtis Granderson reached on a single, Brett Gardner bunted him over — and was safe at first. Granderson then took third on a throwing error steal (never mind, that’s five steals in just 1.5 innings!) and Okijima intentionally walked Jeter, loading the bases. It was a wise move. Marcus Thames grounded into a fielder’s choice, with Granderson thrown out at the plate. While the bases were still loaded, Okijima was sitting pretty. The Yanks were through the heart of their line-up, the game was still tied, and Hadeki was staring in at . . . ah . . . ah . . . Juan Miranda. You know — the .222 minor league prospect no-bat lots-of-speed Juan Miranda. So, with Gardner, Jeter and Thames dancing off the bases, what did Okajima do with Miranda?

He walked him.

(below: Juan Miranda mobbed by teammates after his walk-off walk)

Over at the Custom Card Blog, a whole raft of photo shop experts and baseball fanatics spend at least some of their time creating cards of current stars — and phenoms — using old time Topps cards as models for new sets. The 1968 Topps “tribute” design shown above (and presented last October) is accompanied by this description: “If the Nationals get the first overall pick in 2010 and can draft and sign Bryce Harper, they would have two of the most coveted prospects in all of baseball with Stephen Strasburg and Harper.” Well, the Nats have got them — with Stephen Strasburg making his major league debut tonight, and Bryce Harper now taking a few weeks of rest while Scott Boras determines how much money the kid will bank. It’s possible, in fact it’s likely, that both players are over-hyped: Strasburg is mentioned in the same sentence as Walter Johnson (and Larry Benard “Ben” McDonald), while a YouTube video shows Harper hitting a 502-foot homer off the back of the dome in Tampa. These guys are “the real deal” — they “can’t miss.”

Unless, of course, they do.

The best pitcher I ever saw was a straight-up 6-0 fastball farmboy from central Wisconsin who threw about 94-95 — and no one wanted to face him. The White Sox signed him, sent him to college and then farmed him out to the Midwest League and the American Association. He didn’t dominate, but he had electric stuff. He appeared in the majors and was traded to the Cubs (with a couple of other prospects, for — get this — Ron Santo), where he reportedly threw out his arm. He was “untouchable” — until he faced big league hitters. The best hitter I ever saw (up close) was a high school kid who was once intentionally walked, with the bases loaded, because allowing him to hit was just too dangerous. He was drafted by the Marlins and ended up in Beloit (again, in the Midwest League). The rumor that circulated ever after is that, following his first stint in the batting cage (during which he lofted several flies into the farm fields beyond the center field wall, wherein grazed the requisite number of Holsteins) a Marlins batting instructor told him: “We have to teach you how to hit.” He blew out his knee.

This is the way your career ends, this is the way your career ends: not with a bang, but with a pop — of a shoulder, knee, elbow, ankle, hamstring or heel, with an arm slot that just isn’t right, with a tweeky wrist or tender oblique, with a pulled groin, or broken tibia, fibula or rib. With a cracked, snapped, torn or shredded muscle that doctors replace with other muscles from other places. But even if your career doesn’t end that way there’s this: the stuff between your ears may betray you — or, in odd but legendary cases, make you better than you really are. Scott Sanderson had nothing compared to Stephen Strasburg, but there are pitchers who would have killed for his career. “I couldn’t throw a curve in a hurricane,” Sanderson once told Tim McCarver. You could have fooled the Phillies: whom he owned. And there have been much, much better players than Mark McLemore — who hit just .259 in his career. He’d be lucky if he hit five homers in a season, let alone a single dinger that could even wink at what Harper has done. But McLemore made $20 million hitting the ball between short and third and he played for 19 years. Who wouldn’t take that?

The Nats have drafted Bryce Harper, perhaps the best pure hitter in the first year player draft since the Yankees drafted Derek Jeter (with the fifth pick for God’s sake), and they will sign him. His journey will undoubtedly start somewhere in Florida, after which he’ll head to Arizona and then on to (I would guess) Double-A Harrisburg. Stephen Strasburg’s journey as a major league pitcher will start tonight. We can expect that he’ll overthrow the first time out, before settling down. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll show tonight that he’s the phenom that everyone says he is — or perhaps the Pirates will hit him around. But it won’t matter either way: baseball is a marathon (not a sprint) and is filled with so many oddities and potholes (with so many unpredicted cracks and snaps and tears and pulls) that it will matter less what Strasburg does tonight than what he does three months from now, and three years from now. And my guess is that, given his enormous talent, his ultimate success will depend less on the “stuff” that he pumps towards the plate than the “stuff” between his ears. Tell me I’m wrong.

The 1950 Phillies were one of baseball’s memorable teams: a great pitching staff and heavy long-bomb hitters. And they arrived at the Fall Classic in a similar fashion to their 2009 version: having humbled the Brooklyn version of the Dodgers in the season’s final game. Then, as now, their nemesis was the Yankees, as memorable a team as the Phillies — packed with prodigious power and strong arms.  Del Ennis, Dick Sisler and Richie Ashburn were the keys to the Phillies’ line up: Ennis because of his towering bombs (31 in all in 1950) and Sisler and Ashburn because of their nose-in-the-dirt style of play. We’ve forgotten just how good Ennis was — playing for sixteen years, eleven of them with Philadelphia. In 1950 he had 126 RBIs to lead the team. Ashburn didn’t have Ennis’s power, but his career ended in the Hall of Fame: with a lifetime batting average of .308, three different years with over 200 hits – and a skyscraping OBP. There’s a statue of him now, outside of Citizens Bank Park, in Philadelphia. But 1950 was far from Ashburn’s best year and the team needed the likes of Ennis to get into the series.

“The Whiz Kids” took the N.L. by surprise. No one even knew who they were. The left side of their infield was under 25 and their two best players were kids — Ashburn was 23 and Ennis was 24. Even so, if you knew only a little bit about baseball, you’d have easily picked the Phillies to best the Yankees in the ’50 Series. Their pitching was the class of the National League. The starting rotation was led by Robin Roberts, then in his third year in Philadelphia. He’d gone 20-11 with a 3.02 ERA and he’d thrown 21 complete games. Roberts threw the last game of the season against the Trolleys, and it was a gem: he pitched ten innings of one run ball before Philly won it all in the 10th. Curt Simmon followed Roberts in the rotation — and he looked (at 20) like he was eleven. Like Ennis, he is remembered best by baseball afficiandos. He had very good, but not great years. 1950 was one of his best: he was 17-8 with a 3.40 ERA. The third arm in the rotation belonged to Bob Miller, whose 11-6 record was a surprise to everyone (including Miller). It was the best year he ever had, but Philly needed him desperately — as the war in Korea was culling the N.L. of some of their best pitchers. By the time the series rolled around, the Phillies had lost stalwart Simmons and fireballer Bubba Church to the service.

The Yankees had won the series in ’49, but they knew the Phillies would be tough. To win, they had to get past their pitching. Their line-up was good, even very good, but these were not the Bronx Bombers of the 1920s. Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio were their power hitters, with Phil Rizutto the sparkplug in the middle of the order. Still, Phillies’ fans would be right to wonder why Phil is in the Hall of Fame and not Ennis. “I never thought I deserved to be in the Hall of Fame,” Rizutto once said. “The Hall of Fame is for the big guys.” That’s right, Scooter. The Yankees’ strength was their pitching staff. Vic Raschi (The Springfield Rifle) was the Yanks best starter (he was 21-8 that year), followed by Allie Reynolds and Eddie Lopat. Formidable, sure, but against the Roberts and Ashburn-led Phillies the Yankees knew they were in for a tussle.

Sadly for Phillies’ fans, that’s not how it turned out. In what has to be considered one of the best-pitched and closest World Series ever, the Phillies lost in four — by a combined 11–5 run total. The first game was the surprise, with Phillie closer Jim Konstanty pitching eight innings of one run ball. That how it ended: 1-0. Game 2 was a Robin Roberts’ gem, but he lost the game in the 10th on a DiMaggio home run. The pattern for the series was now well-established, with the Yankees matching the Phillies pitch-for-pitch. The third game ended 3-2, with the Yankees scoring their third run in a walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth. The only game that wasn’t close was the fourth — with the Phillie’s nose-diving, 5-2. The Phillies should have won that fourth game: they were up against a young Yankee hurler by the name of Whitey Ford who’d had only a so-so year.

It seems unlikely that 2009 will see a repeat of the head-to-head pitchers’ duels of 1950. Philadelphia doesn’t have a Robin Roberts or Richie Ashburn or Curt Simmons. In fact, they’re better: with a loaded line-up that makes Ennis and Sisler and Ashburn look like spray hitters (which is, in fact, what they were). Then too, while the current Bronx crew lacks the power and presence of “The Yankee Clipper,” Jeter, Rodriguez and Teixeira hit more like Murderers’ Row than their 1950 ancestors. It will be a real surprise if this is a four-and-out series: and it seems very unlikely to be won by 1-0, 2-1 or 3-2 scores. That said, the 2009 Fall Classic has this one thing in common with the Whiz Kids vs. Empire match-up of 1950: in order for Philly to win, they have to hit Yankee pitching.

The Washington Nationals authored a decisive 7-2 spearing of the Florida Marlins on Sunday, through a combination of stellar starthing pitching and timely hitting. After a long rain delay, Nats’s starter John Lannan dominated the Marlins’ bats through five complete innings, holding the Miami Nine to six hits while striking out three. Reliever Tyler Clippard was, if anything, even more effective (holding the Marlins to one hit over two innings), before Jason Bergman closed out the game. Nats hitters accounted for five hits over unsteady Marlins’ starter Chris Volstad, with the big blows from the bats of Pete Orr and Elijah Dukes. The win boosted Lannan’s record to 9-11, while giving a needed infusion of confidence to Nationals’ hitters, whose bats wer unable to master Florida pitching on Saturday. The 7-2 win gave the Nats the series victory in Florida, three games to two.

Down On Half Street: Derek Jeter recorded his 2,722nd hit on Friday, passing Lou Gehrig for the most hits in Yankees franchise history. Jeter’s landmark hit was properly extolled in the New York and baseball media and we have to give credit where credit is due – there’s no doubt that the Yankees shortstop will end his career by being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and have a plaque dedicated to his accomplishments out in Yankee Stadium’s monument park. Even so, in the wake of Jeter’s accomplishment, ”Baseball Tonight” commentator Steven Berthiaume felt compelled to ask his guests (Orestes Destrade, Eric Young and Buster Olney) whether BBTN was paying too much attention to the Jeter record ”just because he’s a Yankee.” Absolutely not, the trio intoned: Jeter’s mark symbolizes his undisputed place in baseball history and puts him on “the Mt. Rushmore of Yankee greats . . .”  

Well, maybe. But, if you have to ask the question in the first place . . .

 

The Berthiaume question keeps coming up: is “Baseball Tonight” too much of a Boston and New York and east coast-oriented show, with too little focus on west coast teams and west coast match-ups? The producers at BBTN probably have something to say about this — and some of it might even make sense. New York probably provides the largest audience of ESPN viewers and “Baseball Tonight” often (but not always) ends too soon to do a report on west coast scores, particularly if those games run into extra innings. Then too, I’ll just bet that somewhere there’s an internal BBTN memo that says that when Berthiaume and crew lead the broadcast with news about the Padres or A’s, people change channels. Whether we like it or not, the Yankees are of abiding interest (even to fans outside of New York) and the Jeter record is probably more important to the average viewer than, say, the fact that Ryan Howard eclipsed the Phillies’ grand slam home run mark set by Mike Schmidt.  

But if the producers of “Baseball Tonight” are hammered for being “homers” for the Yanks and Red Sox (and the Mets, too, when they don’t stink), it’s only because they often deserve it. Last week the CFG brain trust was convinced that Ichiro would finally get the attention he deserves when he broke one of baseball’s nearly untouchable records: the number of consecutive seasons with 200 or more hits. But that’s not what happened. When Ichiro broke Wee Willie Keeler’s record on Sunday night, ESPN was busy covering the games of another sport while ESPN’s flagship sports reporting program, “SportsCenter,” barely mentioned the accomplishment. But while Baseball Tonight can thereby be excused for their seeming lack of interest, baseball’s pundit class took an “oh and by the way” attitude to Ichiro’s accomplishment in the days leading up to his record breaking infield single on Sunday night. Yankees fans might take umbrage at all of this: that Ichiro is not Jeter, that Ichiro’s record is hardly of the same class as Jeter’s and . . . and that you can’t really compare “Wee Willie” to the “The Iron Horse.” Some of this might be true, but not all of it. While Gehrig was a better ball player than Keeler, the two records are vastly different: Jeter’s record is a team record, while Ichiro’s will reside at Cooperstown.