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BALTIMORE | Good teams don't do this.
Good teams don't get leads of 6-0 and 5-0 against the worst team in baseball and fail to put them away. They don't lose series to the Astros, Indians and Orioles in the span of three weeks, and they don't come up with two hits after the third inning while their pitching staff creates enough room for an opponent to take the game away from them.
But the Nationals have done all that this month. With a 6-5 loss to the Orioles at Camden Yards on Saturday, during which they blew a 5-0 lead a day after surrendering a 6-0 lead, they officially lost their third series this month to a team with less than 30 wins this year.
The culprit on Saturday wasn't the defense, like it was last night. It was the pitching - Livan Hernandez gave back the entire lead, Sean Burnett put a pair of runners on base in the seventh and Drew Storen threw a wild pitch to allow the go-ahead run to cross the plate.
For the second straight game, the Orioles took the lead without having to register a base hit. And good teams don't allow that to happen - at least not as much as the Nationals have recently.
I'm headed down to the clubhouse. I'll have more later.
