Livan Hernandez threw eight complete innings of seven hit ball tonight at Nationals Park — and Washington’s Anacostia Nine went on to defeat the New York Mets, 4-3. The victory — sealed by a lights out ninth inning put-a-W-in-the-books performance from closer Drew Storen — helped to erase the Nats’ Wednesday night 9th inning collapse, and provide a positive note for a tough series against the Apples. At times, Hernandez seemed almost untouchable, notching five strike outs while walking only one. Hernandez picked up his third win on the season.

The big contributor at the plate was Ian Desmond, who was 2-4 with one home run: a typical Desmond left field shot that ended up in the bullpen. The win, which brings the Nationals to 11-13, reflected a new focus on offense, with Washington outhitting the Chokes, 10-8. The anemic batting averages plaguing nearly every hitter on the team (with the exception of Wilson Ramos — who did not play on Thursday), are slowly starting to rise: Rick Ankiel, Danny Espinosa and Ian Desmond were all 2-4, and Jayson Werth is making good contact.

Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: Tim Kurkjian told Baseball Tonight viewers that Ryan Zimmerman’s abdominal strain is still a problem for the Nats’ centerpiece, and that it might be two more weeks before the team gets him back in the line-up. The nagging injury, Kurkjian said, is making it difficult for Zim to make the throw from third . . . Here are the batting averages for tonight’s starting nine — .247, .225, .233, .210, .221, .220, .220, .200 and .111. Of course, that’s counting Livan and leaving out Wilson Ramos, who’s hitting .355 . . .

There was a very nice piece on ESPN’s 30 for 30 tonight on Fernando Valenzuela, who electrified baseball when he arrived in 1980 — and wracked up eight straight victories in his first eight starts. Valenzuela won a Cy Young and Rookie of the Year award in his first year, then led the Dodgers into the World Series against the Yankees in 1981. Valenzuela won the third game of that series, gutting it out against the Bombers when he didn’t have his best stuff. The Dodgers went on to take the Yankees in six games.

But the highlight of Valenzuela’s career (in our humble opinion) came during the 1986 All Star Game, when Valenzuela fanned five batters in a row, tying a record set by Carl Hubbell in the 1934 mid-summer classic. Valenzuela set down (in order), Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken, Jesse Barfield, Lou Whitaker and Teddy Higuera. The strike outs were memorable, but was even more memorable was that when Valenzuela failed to beat Hubbell’s record, he walked from the mound, looked at the dirt and uttered a silent oath: “son of a bitch.” He knew what he was doing, and he wanted that record.

There’s no question, though, that Hubbell was the better pitcher. But what’s interesting about the comparison is that both Hubbell and Valenzuela threw a tightly wound screw ball as their out pitch. Few fans of our era had ever seen one until Valenzuela showed up, and those who remembered what one looked like remembered it because of Hubbell. Carl “Meat Ticket” Hubbell won 253 games, all with the New York Baseball Giants; he won two MVP awards, pitching 3590 innings over 16 years. He was a workhorse. Oh, and the five batters that Hubbell struck out in 1934? Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin.

The death of N.Y. Giants great Bobby Thomson on Tuesday at the age of 86, drove me back to my on-again, off-again sub-hobby of investigating what exactly happened to the “Bobby Thomson ball” — the one that Thomson launched on October 3, 1951 and that ended up in the left field stands at the Polo Grounds. Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round The World” gave the Giants the 1951 pennant (“the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant”), and ranks as the most memorable home run in baseball history. The Thomson home run lives on in film and book and legend. An important part of that legend is consumed with determining what exactly happened to the ball after it landed in the left field seats — where is it, who has it, and what is it worth? Those questions have engaged a generation of memorabilia hunters, amateur sleuths and famous authors –a gaggle of hobbyists whose obsession surely equals that held by a generation of cranks who wonder (still) whether there were shots from the grassy knoll.

How much of a mystery is this? A few years ago, a baseball auction house in New York offered $1 million to anyone who could produce “the Thomson ball,” which spurred a new round of “let no rock remain unturned” charnel house of baseball gurus and ghost hunters to begin the search anew. To no avail: the reward remains unclaimed, the ball unfound. The question of what happened to the “Thomson ball” is so consuming that even noted American authors and filmmakers have weighed in: Don DeLillo fictionalized the travels of the ball as a key dynamic in his novel Underworld (if you haven’t read it, you should), while Francis Ford Coppola, in the Godfather, has parkway attendants listening to the Thomson game when Sonny is murdered at a toll booth — a bit of apocrypha for sure, as we all know (don’t we?) that Sonny was murdered in 1948, not in 1951. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Then too, the flight of the ball sparked Giants followers and baseball afficianados to identify and question nearly every fan who was out in left field that day, going over and over the film of Thomson’s dinger as if it were the Zapruder film. Without appreciable result.

Still, I became convinced several years ago that author and baseball obsessive Brian Biegel has probably provided the best answer to the mystery. Biegel, whose father Jack claimed he bought the ball for $2 at a Long Island Salvation Army store, set out to prove him right — and (alas) ended up proving him wrong. After years of investigation, Biegel showed that a baseball loving nun (“Sister Helen”), who attended the Giants-Dodgers game in violation of her Franciscan convent rules, snagged the ball and carried it with her in a shoebox her entire life. When she died many years later in Albuquerque (and after a lifetime of selfless devotion to her order), her colleagues in the convent lovingly sorted through her personal belongings, found the ball and gave it to her sister. And what did the sister of Sister Helen do with the ball? She looked over the ball, shrugged her shoulders, shook her head and deposited both shoebox and ball in a landfill.

Bobby Thomson hit “the shot heard round the world.” Thomson’s walk off home run came at precisely 3:58 pm, New York time, on October 3, 1951 — and is considered the most dramatic moment in baseball history. Thomson’s bottom of the 9th shot came off  Brooklyn Dodgers’ right hander Ralph Branca with two men on. With the Dodgers leading 4-2, Branca threw Thomson a first pitch fastball over the center of the plate. The next pitch was inside and high and Thomson swung. The hit was not a towering fly ball, but a line drive that sailed into the left field seats of the lower deck in the Polo Grounds. It gave the New York Giants a 5-4 win and the N.L. Pennant, two games to one. The two teams had finished the season with identical 96-58 records. The Giants had taken the first of the three game playoff series (3-1) and the Dodgers the second (10-0). Deadlocked at one game apiece, the third game would decide the pennant. What made Thomson’s home run even more dramatic is that the Giants had won 37 of their last 44 games to force the playoff, having trailed the Dodgers by 13 games in mid-August.

Also known as “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff,” Thomson’s home run is celebrated in the immortal broadcast of Russ Hodges that was heard on WMCA-AM radio — “The Voice of the New York Giants”: “There’s a long drive… it’s gonna be, I believe…The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they’re goin’ crazy, they’re goin’ crazy!”

For many years it was not known what happened to Thomson’s home run ball. While innumerable myths have surrounded its whereabouts (most recently in Don DeLillo’s Underworld), it is now believed that a Franciscan nun recovered the ball and kept it in a shoebox for fifty years. When she died, her sister collected the shoebox and deposited it in a landfill. Willie Mays, then 20, was on deck when Thomson hit his home run.