The Nationals and Dodgers tried their best to get all four games of this mid-week series in. Didn’t happen. After Wednesday’s rain out, the scheduled doubleheader on Thursday was only half completed. Game 1 ended at 4:38 p.m. Shortly after that the rains started in earnest again and they didn’t stop. By 7 p.m. the decision was made to cancel the final game. The Dodgers have a series in San Francisco, after all, starting Friday night. They do not make a return trip to the East Coast this season so it’s highly unlikely the game gets made up at all unless Los Angeles is somehow still in contention for a playoff berth and needs to complete its schedule. That’s virtually impossible at this point with a 70-72 record and 19 games left.
“There are a lot of decisions that go into canceling a game,” Washington general manager Mike Rizzo said. “There are personnel decisions, there are team decisions, there’s [Major League Baseball] decisions. I thought we did a good job of getting in as many games as we could. And we were in total conjunction with MLB. Just felt we couldn’t get this last one in.”
Expect the pitching rotation to stay on track for the three-game series with Houston this weekend at Nationals Park. That means Stephen Strasburg will pitch as scheduled Sunday. Tom Milone remains Friday’s pitcher and John Lannan goes Saturday against the Astros. Thursday’s Game 2 starter was supposed to be Ross Detwiler. He will be temporarily skipped – though it would make sense to pencil him in for Monday’s game at the New York Mets.
This is the second time in four seasons the Nats will likely lose a game. The season finale against Florida was canceled in 2008 and never made up. That actually helped Washington finish with the sport’s worst winning percentage and led to the No. 1 draft pick that next spring – Strasburg.
“Well, I’ve had more extreme weather,” Rizzo said. “But as far as just a steady downpour of rain and decisions that you have to make it’s been a pretty active weather season when you talk about earthquakes and hurricanes and downpours of rain for days and days at a time.
More bad news: Washington’s Double-A affiliate, the Harrisburg Senators, saw their beautiful, recently renovated home field, Metro Bank Park, deluged with flood waters. The Washington, D.C. area has been hit hard, certainly. But it’s even worse in central Pennsylvania and New York. Metro Bank Park is located on City Island, which sits right in the middle of the now raging Susquehanna River. Aerial pictures Thursday evening showed the field completely submerged. Hard to imagine the Senators playing any home playoff games there. The first two games of their first-round series against Richmond were already moved to Virginia thanks to the weather even though Harrisburg had home-field advantage.
“It’s unfortunate the flooding situation that happened there. I saw a picture of the stadium and it’s certainly unplayable,” Rizzo said. “It looks like it’s going to be unplayable for a long, long time. They’re going to have to strap it on in a foreign ballpark for the series. But we’re confident in the guys that they’ll take it to another level. Hopefully they can win a series.”
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