Phillies 5, Nats 4
The broken record continues to spin. The Nats managed to hit three home runs against two-time Cy Young Award winner Roy Halladay and yet didn’t come away with a Memorial Day victory at Nationals Park on Monday. Check out the details in our game story here. They’ll seem familiar. The killer inning was the seventh when a tiring Halladay faced runners at first-and-third and escaped with no damage.
Washington has now lost three in a row and 13 of 17. The Nats have a 5-13 record in one-run games, including six of those losses in their last 11 games. It’s a brutal way to go down each and every night with the image of a handful of plays leaving what-might-have-beens dancing in their heads at night.
“It seems like we have a lot of these games lately,” first baseman Michael Morse said. “We’re playing good baseball and that’s the tough part. Our starting pitchers are keeping us in the game, our bats came around today and we got the loss. So it’s tough. We know we played hard. We just got to forget it and go out tomorrow and play hard again.”
Morse extended his hitting streak to eight games with a solo home run in the second inning – though when Comcast SportsNet’s Kelly Johnson brought that up Morse made her knock on wood. Ballplayers do have their superstitions. That was one of five solo homers hit on Monday – three of them by Washington. Danny Espinosa had another. He is now tied with Jayson Werth and Laynce Nix for the team lead (eight). Morse is right behind with seven. That’s pretty good power balance. Now if only they could get star third baseman Ryan Zimmerman (abdominal surgery) back in the lineup next month.
Starting pitcher Livan Hernandez (3.87 ERA) had an interesting day. His safety squeeze in the second inning pushed home a run to put the Nats up 2-0. But he just about fell apart in the fourth inning, allowing solo homers to Ryan Howard and – surprise, surprise – Raul Ibanez, who always destroys Washington pitching it seems. Three more batters, three more hits and suddenly a 2-0 lead was a 3-2 deficit. But Hernandez escaped the jam and pitched into the seventh inning to give the Nats a chance to win. But reliever Sean Burnett struggled again and the offense couldn’t get those runs back for him. Washington battled Halladay, for sure. But no moral victories here.
“All that stuff about ‘You guys are playing great and staying in the game’ – at the end it doesn’t add up,” infielder Alex Cora said. “You just want to win. It would be great tomorrow if we score seven and make five errors and win the game. We’ve been playing great, but at the end of the day it’s not about not hitting or hitting or not making plays or making plays. It’s about whoever has the most runs on the scoreboard and it hasn’t happened for us lately.”
As for Cora, manager Jim Riggleman said he was right to go on contact with runners at first and third and no one out in the seventh inning. The ball was hit hard up the middle and Halladay made a nice play to knock it down and keep it nearby. If Cora stays at third the likely result is a double play anyway with two down now and a man at third instead of first and second and one out if he gets into a run down.
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