The Nationals lost 6-3 against the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the story of tonight was 3-2 counts and squandered opportunities. The Nationals were handed 7 walks to go with 7 hits, but the Nats were only 2-12 with runners-in-scoring-position. Jayson Werth was 0-4 with 3 strikeouts and Jose Lobaton was also 0-4 in the game. One of the most crucial points of the game is when Lobaton was asked to bunt in the 8th inning with no outs and runners on 1st and 2nd, but he pushed the bunt right to Paul Goldschmidt who easily cut down Rendon for a force at 1st base, and the doubleplay throw across the diamond to get Lobaton at 1st base was dropped.
The Diamondbacks worked counts all night to 3-2 full counts and took advantage twice for home runs. Tanner Roark just was not sharp, but inexplicably, Dusty Baker left Roark stay for 6 full innings and 125 pitches. What reason do you allow a struggling Roark to stay so long in the game? One logical answer is the poor bullpen can’t be trusted, but you never want to burn out starters because you don’t trust your bullpen. We are only in the 26th game of the season. This goes back to the season is a marathon and we are just past the 3rd mile.
“Well you know we, you know, we didn’t want to bring in you know, we had Ollie Perez, he got up twice and we didn’t want to get him up again. Then we were short you know on our right side of the bullpen you know,” Dusty Baker said. “You know we didn’t like taking Tanner up you know that high in pitches you know. I’m sure they didn’t like taking their guy up that high in pitches also. But that was his last batter. Like I said you know, we were short you know in our bullpen you know. We had some guys that were hurting some you know.”
Do you really care that the opposing pitcher threw his 117th pitch the half inning before? Lefty reliever Oliver Perez was warm in the Nationals bullpen and the last batter Roark faced was the lefty Hermann who hit a 2-run home run off of Roark.
Dusty Baker had a difficult time piecing together his words in the beginning of his postgame presser.
