Nats waste scoring chances in another loss to Yankees (updated)

NEW YORK – Needing to play a much cleaner brand of baseball, the Nationals returned to Yankee Stadium trying to put last night’s disastrous loss behind them.

Although they gave themselves more opportunities to hang with the Bronx Bombers, they couldn’t come up with clutch hits to capitalize on them. And it didn’t help that their mistakes on the basepaths continued in a 5-1 loss to the Yankees.

CJ Abrams singled in the first inning to give the Nats their first baserunner early. But that was quickly erased when he was picked off by Yankees starter Luis Gil, with the original safe call being overturned by a New York challenge.

The Nats then got a one-out walk by Riley Adams in the second, but couldn’t move him past first base.

They were more successful in the third, but still left a golden opportunity to score a crooked number. Robert Hassell III led off with a double to the right-center field gap, and after a James Wood walk, he scored on Abrams' single to left to give the Nats a 1-0 lead.

But after Abrams and Wood moved to third and second, respectively, on a balk by Gil, the Nationals wasted the threat with two flyouts. The Nats then drew two walks in the fourth, but those came between three strikeouts in the inning.

The Nats’ next opportunity to score came in the fifth, when Wood led off with a double to right. But with two outs, Josh Bell singled to left and third base coach Ricky Gutierrez aggressively sent Wood home, where he was easily thrown out by Cody Bellinger.

"I'm gonna tell you, we're gonna take our chances," interim manager Miguel Cairo said after the game. "Like I said, we're gonna be aggressive. We're gonna take our chances. And we're gonna learn from our mistakes. We're gonna be smart at the same time. But we're gonna be aggressive.”

But perhaps the Nats’ biggest opportunity came when they loaded the bases with one out in the sixth, only to have Jacob Young strike out against Gil and Wood ground out against left-handed reliever Tim Hill.

All told, the Nationals went 3-for-12 with runners in scoring position and left nine runners on base. An improvement in terms of opportunity, but not nearly good enough in terms of actually taking advantage.

“You want to always try to get it to the next guy," Abrams said. "Doesn't matter who's on the mound or who we're playing. Just trying to get it to the next guy, score as many runs as we can.”

“We're preaching: Make him throw strikes," Cairo said. "Make him come to the strike zone and don't chase. And the last couple of days, we've been chasing a little bit. But we've got our chances. Like I said, we got our chances, we didn't capitalize on it. They've been doing a really good job. We've been playing really good baseball. But sometimes it goes like, they're pitching good.”

MacKenzie Gore put forth a solid effort to keep his team in the ballgame and not let it spiral out of control as it did last night. He held the Yankees to just two runs over six innings last year at Nationals Park. But he fell one inning short of repeating his quality-start effort tonight.

Gore only gave up runs in one inning – a three-run bottom of the third – but his struggles with two outs prevented him from going deeper in this game.

The Nationals southpaw threw only 17 pitches in the first inning, but it could have been fewer if not for a two-out double to Bellinger. Then his rough third frame really put him behind.

After striking out Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells, Gore gave up a two-out double to Paul Goldschmidt and back-to-back walks to Aaron Judge and Bellinger to load the bases for Giancarlo Stanton. The lefty flirted with disaster as the Yankees slugger fouled off two fastballs left over the heart of the plate. But Stanton didn’t miss the 3-2 curveball in the lower part of the zone.

Stanton launched the ball to the left-center field gap and it looked like a sure-thing grand slam. But luckily for Gore, it fell a few feet short of going over the wall and Stanton had to settle for a bases-clearing double to give the Yankees a 3-1 lead.

“We started off the inning with two strikeouts," Gore said. "I think it was just those four hitters, which is frustrating. But yeah, those four guys got on and did some damage, and that's kind of what the game was.”

Gore then won a six-pitch battle with Trent Grisham to end the inning, but that left his pitch count at 69 through three. He did finish the night retiring the last seven batters he faced, capping off the outing with a strikeout of Judge on his 99th pitch (and with an assist from home plate umpire Laz Diaz). But Gore was left to wonder how much deeper in the game he could have gone had he been a bit more efficient with two outs.

“We did a lot of good things other than that. But yeah, that kind of decided the game," he said. "And that's who those guys are at the top of their lineup. They get a few baserunners, get some momentum going, and then they have a big swing. That's how they manufacture runs and that's what they did. And I just didn't do a good job not letting them do that.”

Orlando Ribalta replaced Gore to start the sixth and let this one get out of hand. The big righty reliever didn’t retire any of the first three batters he faced, and gave up a moonshot two-run homer to Stanton in the second at-bat of the inning, sending the Yankee Stadium crowd of 35,531 into a frenzy. Ribalta proceeded to load the bases after the homer, but escaped without any further damage.

“They got really good hitters and any of those guys can change the game in a bit," the interim skipper said. "We made a couple of mistakes and we paid (for it).”

Former Yankee Clayton Beeter also loaded the bases with two outs in the seventh, but got Jazz Chisholm Jr. to pop out on the first pitch.

And although the Nationals escaped those precarious situations on the mound, they weren’t able to do significant damage in similar situations at the plate, leading to their fourth straight loss.

“Like you said, we didn't capitalize in those chances," Cairo said. "And with a team like that, you got to score whenever you get a chance. But it didn't happen. We have to go back tomorrow and do it again.”

“We swung the bats. The timely hits weren't there," Abrams said. "Like you said, we got some chances to score more runs and we didn't. So we gotta do that tomorrow.”