Nationals 10, Marlins 7
It all happened so quickly. An ugly, sloppy game saw the Nats down two runs in the eighth inning, a big crowd growing restless and surly and the second-place Atlanta Braves playing the worst team in the big leagues at home and poised to gain another game in the standings.
By the end of that half inning, players were taking curtain calls and the dugout had erupted into baseball’s version of a frat party. A tub of gum may have been dumped on someone. It got out of hand. And it was fun.
“I don’t know how to explain it when those innings happen,” first baseman Adam LaRoche said. “We had one of those against us in the 9-0 lead where you just kind of sit back and don’t really know what’s going on. It’s nice to be on the good end of it. It’s just pitch by pitch and guys going up and putting good at-bats together.”
Read the details of that dramatic six-run eighth inning in our game story here. It was classic pennant-race baseball as a team out of the playoff picture tried to hold off one that doesn’t seem surprised anymore when it wins games this way. First Steve Lombardozzi got the two-out pinch hit and then Tyler Moore did the same. Veteran pinch hitter Chad Tracy reacted like a proud father when Moore reached the dugout later after Danny Espinosa crushed his tiebreaking homer to left.
“I was like ‘I ain’t tagging for that.’ I knew that was going,” Moore joked.
Moore is going to have to get used to batting cold with the game on the line. He was almost the choice to go back to the minor leagues when Jayson Werth was activated this week before reliever Henry Rodriguez came up with an injured back. Now that Washington’s outfield is healthy and regular starts are unlikely a late-game pinch-hitting role is going to be Moore’s lot. He came through on Saturday by lacing a 1-2 pitch into right field for the game-tying RBI. Tracy had nine pinch-hit RBI in the first two months of the season before needing sports hernia surgery. There’s no one better to learn from.
“That guy’s a wizard off the bench. He’s awesome. He’s good,” Moore said. “We just kind of talk. Him and [Mark] DeRosa, too. We’ll go in our tunnel, hit, get loose and just kind of talk about the pitchers that are coming up and what to expect. That helps out a lot.”
So what’s the most important task for a pinch hitter?
“Getting a hit any way you can,” Moore said with a laugh. “The result. But you get up there you make sure your body is loose and then mentally you try to take the crowd out of it and just settle down.”
Washington increased its National League East lead back to 3 games and is again 21 games over .500 (64-43). They have a 5 ½ game cushion before falling out of the NL playoff race. Nights like this one, with a near-sellout crowd roaring to life in the eighth, gives a sense of what pennant-race baseball can be in this town – even if it’s just a tad early yet.
“There’s so much baseball left. I hate to start scoreboard watching yet,” said LaRoche, who homered twice. “Obviously we want to stay up in the division and get as big a lead as we can, but a lot can happen. We keep playing like this, coming back like this, we’re going to be good.”
The win masked a so-so night for right-handed pitcher Jordan Zimmermann, who was granted an extra day off between starts to allow medicine to do its work on his inflamed right shoulder. He reported no problems afterwards and manager Davey Johnson said his pitcher was fine. Zimmermann’s velocity seemed normal. He wasn’t really hit that hard despite seven hits, a walk and a hit batter in just five innings. He had not gone less than six innings in a start this season. But a couple of softies in the early innings set the tone for Miami and Zimmermann’s defense let him down to the tune of three errors.
“Jordan pitched great again and we basically let him down on defense. I let him down and made a couple errors that cost us runs,” Espinosa said of his rare struggles at shortstop. “Our team should never have been in the situation we were in to have to come back like that. He pitched too well. He could have gone probably seven, eight innings the way he was pitching and when you make errors behind a guy like that it extends the pitches he has to throw and doesn’t really show how well he did for the night.”
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