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 handed down by Major League Baseball on Friday after he intentionally threw at the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani. 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.
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 appeared to take Young’s 103.3-mph line drive off his right ribcage and had to depart the game in obvious pain.
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).
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 Davey Martinez opted to leave his starter in for the bottom of the sixth.
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.
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. And though Brady House and Riley Adams (with help from Lowe’s nice scoop) followed it with solid plays in the field, the Padres nevertheless had taken the lead on that one critical decision with the bases loaded.