Jayson Werth’s 13th inning single past a diving Zack Cozart scored Danny Espinosa and gave the Nationals a 2-1 victory at Nationals’ Park on Friday night — extending the team’s early season winning streak to four games. Werth’s single came after Jordan Zimmermann pitched seven innings of three hit baseball, and the Nationals’ bullpen held the Reds to two hits in six innings.
“That was good,” Werth said, following the victory. “We were out there for a long time. You play that long and not get a win, that would hurt. We are lucky to get the win. We have another game tomorrow, the next day and the day after that. Hopefully, we’ll keep winning.” The victory brought the Nationals to 6-2 on the year, their best start since coming to Washington.
The game featured a tough pitchers’ duel between Washington starter Zimmermann, and Cincinnati’s Bronson Arroyo. Arroyo pitched into the eighth inning, holding the Nationals to just three hits while striking out four, and aiding his own cause by going 1-2 and hitting in Cincinnati’s lone run. D.C. starter Zimmermann matched him on the mound, throwing 100 pitches, 71 for strikes.
Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: Major League Baseball is starting to take note of the Nationals, particularly considering the early season struggles of their main competitors. The Phillies are 3-4 on the young season, and lost last night to R.A. Dickey’s Mets, 5-2 . . . The Philllies are without slugger Ryan Howard and spark plug Chase Utley, both sidelined with injuries . . .
Atlanta also sits at 3-4, though they won last night against Milwaukee in a slugfest, 10-8 . . . Unlike the Phillies, the Braves are healthy, except for Chipper Jones (battling a rehabbing knee) and Tim Hudson, who’s pitching through a bad back with rehab starts in the minors . . .
Then there are the Florida Miami Marlins, who beat the Astros last night in a thrilling walk-off. The Marlins are 3-5, fighting their way through off-field distractions, and now battling their way through a new ballpark. There were at least four long fly balls into left field during last night’s game that would have been home runs nearly everywhere else. The betting is that, at some point, the team will be forced to move in the fences, as the Mets did at CitiField . . .
After dropping two of three to the Nationals, the Mets have tuned out baseball pundits who picked them for last place in the N.L East. While Jason Bay is hitting an anemic .174, he seems to play better outside of New York, where the boos rain down every time he steps to the plate . . .
Bay “boiled over” during the recent Nationals’ 4-0 scrubbing of the Mets in New York, arguing balls and strikes with home plate umpire Larry Vanover. Mets’ manager Terry Collins defended his left fielder, got tossed from the game for supporting him, but has no regrets. “Jason Bay doesn’t say anything to anybody . . . So when he’s arguing, there’s an issue.”
Bay got some revenge last night in Philadelphia, where he crushed a Cliff Lee fastball over the fence in right center. “The way things have been going, I normally would have missed it or taken it,” Bay said after the Mets’ win. “It’s nice to, at least for one day, one at-bat, say, ‘Hey, we can build off that.’” The Mets are 5-2 on the young season . . .
For Phillies Phans this is the apocalypse. Chris Carpenter held the “can’t miss” Ashburns to just three hits, and the upstart Cardinals went on to take the NLDS three games to two in a sparkling 1-0 win in Philadelphia, ending the Phillies post-season dream of another October World Series appearance. Phillies fans were so disappointed, they didn’t even boo.
The Philadelphia loss was as surprising as the poor performance of Charlie Manuel’s team, which couldn’t put together enough hits to cage the Redbirds. “Actually, I don’t know what to say,” Manuel said, following the loss. “I just got through talking to our team, and basically when I look at it, we played 162 games, and definitely we had the best record in baseball.”
But the best record (and the best pitching staff), wasn’t enough to carry the Phillies into the NLCS — with Phillies’ fans describing their team’s elimination as “a crushing disappointment.” The depth of the loss is reflected in the Philadelphia blogosphere: “Thud” was the headline of The Good Phight, while Beerleaguer led its coverage with “Failure In Philly.”
But while baseball’s blogworld focuses on “the Phailure in Philadelphia,” Friday’s loss was more the result of Chris Carpenter’s pitching performance than the poor hitting of Ryan Howard & Company. Carpenter walked none and struck out three, taming Halladay in what Cardinals’ manager Tony LaRussa called “a dream match-up” of Cy Young winners. Carpenter threw 110 pitches, 70 of them for strikes. It was a Phorgettable night in Philly, but not in St. Louis.
Of course, there are teams in baseball that would love to have bragging rights to a 102 win season — including the one right here in Washington. But expectations were so high in Philadelphia that what will follow now is an off-season of recriminations, and an effort to find that one missing piece that Phillies’ fans think they need. It might be ugly. “There are no two ways around it: 2011 is a failure for the Phillies,” Crashburn Alley said. Oh, boo-hoo . . .
An early morning email to CFG seemed to say it all: “What a series. It makes me proud to be a Nats fan.” Indeed, Nationals fans have a right to be buoyant after sweeping a four game series from the Phillies. And in Philadelphia. Phillies fans felt the disappointment after dropping their sixth loss in a row (by a score of 6-1) — when it became clear that the Nats were on their way to a victory, they streamed from “the Bank,” issuing boos to their team.
“Our pitching is great. Our defense is great and we have timely hitting,” the Nationals Michale Morse said following the victory. “We had a lot of big hits. We had timely hitting this whole series. It shows you that we could play. We could be a big contender in this division coming up.”
The story of the game, once again, was what was happening to the resurgent Nationals on the mound. Indeed, the Nationals were only able to bang out seven hits against an effective Roy Oswalt. But it was Nationals’ pitching that won the game: rookie auditioner Brad Peacock threw 5.2 innings of one hit baseball — an extraordinary performance from a former Triple-A star who is now in the running as a potential fourth (or even third) starter in 2012.
“I had a lot of good pitches tonight,” Peacock said following his outing. “Everything was working. I just let them put the ball in play. My defense was great tonight. [Catcher Jesus Flores] called a great game. That’s all you can ask for. I didn’t shake him off one time — not once — because I trust him back there.”
The victory was not only the culmination of a four game series: it marked the tenth victory for the Nationals in eighteen meetings between the teams this year. And while the Phillies said they weren’t panicking, they were clear disturbed by the reaction of their fans.
. . . because, while the Nationals keep winning in Philly, they still have seven games to play and, no matter what they do, will finish no better than third. We’re not just being killjoys: while it’s wonderful to see our Anacostia Nine play so well (especially at “Nats Park North”), there are some among us who (in the middle of the 7th inning last night — and then again in the 8th) stood up and screamed — “that’s just great, but where were you in June?”
The answer oughta be obvious: trying to find a pitching staff. That the Nats have now won consistently, when it counts the least, is evidence that (finally), that seems to have been done. John Lannan didn’t pitch brilliantly last night, but he fought hard and well (he’s not the same pitcher we saw last year), and a whole handful of other arms have now emerged: Milone and Peacock, and Wang and Detwiler — not to mention Jordan Zimmermann and Stephen Strasburg (and, just maybe, Livan Hernandez). And those are just the starters.
Then too, the bats have nearly ended their slumber: the Nationals pounded out ten hits last night, which included home runs from Danny Espinosa (his 21st, setting a Nationals rookie record), and the vastly underrated Wilson Ramos (who hit his 14th, which is none too shabby). More importantly, the Nats shook off their disturbing habit of serving tea to men on base — eight were left on base last night, but that number is going down, and they’ve damned near returned to the league mean.
As important (we think) is that the Nationals are now 9-8 against their in-division rivals — with the bonus that Nats fans have started to stream north. That an indication (perhaps), that Nats fans are anticipating what might (might) happen next year. “It’s a fun time,” Danny Espinosa said of his visit to the not-so-friendly confines of The Bank. “It’s a fun game to play against them. I want to play them hard because I know we can beat them. We are showing that. For myself, personally, I enjoy playing against the team.”
Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: We’ve decided to change the description of the New York Mets — they’re no longer “the chokes.” That description more aptly fits the Atlanta Braves, who barely showed up to play the Marlins last night in Miami, and lost to the stinking Fish. It wasn’t even close. Now they know how it feels. The Braves now lead the Cardinals (who woulda thought — and certainly not us), by a single game and some spit. The Cardinals surprised everyone (including their own fans) and rallied to beat the Mets in St. Louis, 6-5 . . .
You can never have too much pitching, but it appears that (if yesterday is any indication), the Nationals have more than enough for next year. Ross Detwiler is the latest evidence — the young lefty produced another more-than-solid outing on Tuesday night, at the back end of a day-night double header, taming the Philadelphia Phillies through 7.1 innings. He shut down the defending N.L. East champs and provided a sweep of the doubleheader in Philadelphia.
The 3-0 victory put the Nationals at 8-8 vs. Philadelphia this season, and Charlie Manuel has to be impressed — the Nats play Philadelphia tough, which is more than you can say about their abilities against the Marlins. Of course, Detwiler had help: a Danny Espinosa home run in the second, a throwing error from Phillies’ catcher Carlos Ruiz that allowed Jayson Werth to score, and his own single up the middle in the sixth.
But Detwiler’s heroics tell only a part of the story: while the box score shows a Nationals’ win, a Philadelphia fans memory will come down to this — an upstart team and untried lefty came into “the Bank” and outdueled Cliff Lee (with his stinking 2.38 ERA), a member of Philadelphia’s vaunted quartet of starters — the third of four veteran pitchers that Philadelphia is counting on to mount yet another assault in this game of capture the flag.
Of course, the other line in Philadelphia is not so much that the Nationals won, but that the Phillies lost. The Ashburns have already clinched the division and can rightly (if lamely) claim that impressive as Detwiler was, Philadelphia’s twin losses on Tuesday show that the Ponies aren’t exactly all in. Still, the Bard of South Philadelphia, is a little disturbed, and not necessarily because he’s paid to be.
“I’m not worried, I just like to see us play better,” manager Charlie Manuel said following the twin losses. “We clinched our division three days ago. Right now, I wouldn’t call it going through the motions. I’d say we’re not focused. We’re not focused into the game, I feel like. It’s normal in some respects.”
For Davey Johnson, however, Detwiler’s pitching (and not the Phillies’ performance), was the story of the game — he was why they performed poorly. “I can’t say enough good things about him,” Johnson said of his young starter. “The Phillies are a great hitting ballclub and he was letter perfect . . . Today he was nice, calm and collected and threw a lot of quality pitches.”
Detwiler made headlines, but so too did Drew Storen, who was perfect in the ninth, and notched his 40th save. Considering the Nationals’ bullpen performance in 2010, Storen’s season long excellence should be cause for a celebration or two. Storen has given the Nationals just over 72 innings in the role of closer this year, with a 2.86 ERA. Those numbers put him among the league’s elite.
No Country For Tim Lincecum: Forget pitching, what you can’t ever have enough of is baseball. Sliding up and down the dial last night (well, it used to be a dial), you could take in a murder in Connecticut over at CNN, or No Country For Old Men on AMC — it must be a marathon, they’ve shown it back to back on successive nights . . .
“Tommy was real impressive,” Nats’ manager Davey Johnson said of Tom Milone after the Nats dealt the Phillies a 4-3 defeat in ten innings on Tuesday afternoon. “He showed me a lot.” Milone pitched a solid six innings of shutout ball against the Phillies, giving up just four hits and striking out two.
But Milone’s probable win was erased by the Philllies in the bottom of the seventh, when Doug Slaten and Tyler Clippard couldn’t hold the heavy hitting Phillies, who tied the game on a Nats’ killer Raul Ibanez home run. Ibanez’s soaring dinger came off Tyler Clippard with two on base, and erased the heroics of Roger Bernadina, who had put one into the right field seats in the top of the frame.
It wasn’t until the 10th inning that the Nationals could strike back: with two out, Michael Morse walked (and went to second on a passed ball), Danny Espinosa was intentionally walked and pinch hitter Ryan Zimmerman singled to bring in Espinosa with the go-ahead run. Drew Storen came on in the bottom of the tenth (it was another nail biter) and recorded his 39th save.
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.
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 . . .
