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SAN DIEGO – Even as they put together a bunch of quality at-bats and jumped out to an early three-run lead tonight at Petco Park, the Nationals knew deep down they had squandered some opportunities to put the game away and had let the Padres keep it close enough to set up a potential comeback.
Sure enough, that early three-run lead evaporated over the course of the middle innings. And when they couldn’t mount any kind of late rally against one of the league’s best bullpens, the Nats found themselves on the wrong end of a 4-3 loss to San Diego.
The Padres scored all four runs from the fourth through the sixth innings, all of the runs charged to Trevor Williams even though the last of them crossed the plate after he departed. The Nationals, who totaled six hits through their first four innings at the plate, managed only one more the rest of the way.
With one last shot at rallying in the ninth, they went down quietly against All-Star closer Robert Suarez, who reportedly dropped his appeal of a three-game suspension - which Major League Baseball imposed on Friday after Suarez intentionally threw at the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani on Thursday - after it was reduced to two games. Suarez won’t be available for Wednesday afternoon’s series finale, but he was still allowed to take the mound tonight in a one-run game.
"They've got a really good bullpen," manager Davey Martinez said. "We knew that coming in. The objective for us is to try to score first and get on the board, beat the starters up a bit earlier. Once they get into that bullpen, it's tough."
A Nationals lineup not always known for patience showed it early on tonight against Padres starter Ryan Bergert, with three of their first 11 batters drawing a walk, including back-to-back free passes accepted by CJ Abrams and James Wood (the latter with the bases loaded to force home a run).
There was also solid fundamental execution, especially by Jacob Young. The previously struggling No. 9 batter laid down a perfect safety squeeze to score Daylen Lile in the top of the second, then beat out an infield single and stole a base in the top of the fourth to put him in position to score moments later on Wood’s sixth RBI of the series, his 63rd of the season.
That infield single, though, came at a severe cost to Bergert, who took Young’s 103.3-mph line drive off his right forearm and had to depart the game in obvious pain, though X-rays came back negative.
The Nationals totaled three runs against Bergert, but there was ample opportunity for more. They took nine at-bats with runners in scoring position through those first four innings, only one of them resulting in a hit (and that one didn’t even plate a run).
"We had some chances," Martinez said. "We had bases loaded. In games like that, we score one or two more runs right there, the game's different."
That would prove important as the game played out and the Padres chipped away at the Nats’ 3-0 lead. Williams breezed through his first three innings on 35 pitches, allowing a couple of singles but nothing more. Then the veteran right-hander began giving up louder contact the second time through the order, and San Diego came away with a couple of runs in the bottom of the fourth to crack the scoreboard for the first time in the game. He would open the fifth by grooving an 88-mph fastball over the plate to Martin Maldonado, and the .184-hitting No. 9 batter blasted it into the left field bleachers for the game-tying homer.
By the time the fifth ended, Williams had thrown only 62 pitches. But he had faced the top half of the Padres lineup three times, with diminishing results. The Nationals bullpen, on the other hand, was looking quite taxed on day 15 of a 16-day stretch without a break, so Martinez opted to leave his starter in for the bottom of the sixth.
"He was throwing the ball really well," the manager said. "He had 62 pitches going into the sixth inning. He had plenty (left in the tank)."
Williams immediately issued back-to-back walks on eight pitches, most of them missing by a wide margin to his arm side. Martinez decided not to push it any further and signaled for that bullpen to try to clean up the mess.
"That's obviously not what we're trying to do, the first eight pitches of the sixth to be balls," Williams said. "I just have to do a better job of finding that adjustment quicker, because it really puts us in a hole. ...
"I'm coming into the sixth with a low pitch count, and I've got to do a better job of putting my foot down and giving a blow to the bullpen."
Cole Henry suffered from the same command issue as his predecessor and walked the first batter he faced to load the bases. The rookie did manage to induce three straight ground balls after that. Alas, first baseman Nathaniel Lowe froze on the first one, electing not to try to get the out at the plate in favor of the easy out at first.
"I'd like to get a better grip on that ball before I send it home," Lowe said, suggesting he had time to make the throw but wasn't confident it would've been on target. "I didn't make a play that in retrospect I would've liked to have made. And we lost."
And though Brady House and Riley Adams (with help from Lowe’s nice scoop) followed the previous play with solid plays of their own in the field, the Padres nevertheless had taken the lead on that one critical decision with the bases loaded.
How difficult, Lowe was asked, is it to make that split-second decision?
"There are about 30 guys every night that could tell you how difficult it is," the 2023 Gold Glove Award winner said with a wry laugh. "And 30 out of 7 billion sounds like a pretty small group. If there were more guys that could do it, they would. But there aren't."
