PHILADELPHIA — They arrived in town with spirits low, losers in three of their last four games and suddenly faced with a crucial weekend series to close out the first half of the season.
And when they opened up a five-run lead not once but twice at Citizens Bank Park last night, the Washington Nationals appeared headed for a rare but much-needed blowout victory.
Anyone who has followed the Nationals with any regularity, though, knows this team just doesn’t win by wide margins. Why beat an opponent by five runs when you can hang on for dear life and escape with another one-run win?
It has become a tried-and-true formula for Washington, and it played out again last night against the Philadelphia Phillies. Despite leading by five runs in the fourth inning and again in the sixth, the Nationals held on through another tense game before winning 8-7 before a sellout crowd of 44,688.
“I don’t know what it is, man,” said first baseman Carlos Baerga, whose three-run homer helped pace Washington. “These close games are exciting, but they’re not exciting for us. We want to have some relief. You want to have your mind at ease a little. But that’s the way we win.”
This win allowed Washington (52-34) to maintain its 2-1/2-game lead over the surging Atlanta Braves in the National League East while guaranteeing the Nationals will remain in first place at the All-Star break. More importantly, they righted their derailing train after the disastrous series against the New York Mets that ended Thursday at RFK Stadium.
“[A loss] tonight would have been kind of devastating,” manager Frank Robinson said.
That’s because Washington had a 5-0 lead in the fourth. Even after starter Ryan Drese gave three runs back in the fifth, Baerga picked up his pitcher by clubbing a three-run homer in the sixth to make it 8-3.
The veteran infielder gets plenty of ribbing for his stocky physique and finely moussed hair, but he has been invaluable when called upon. Pressed into service at first base while Nick Johnson continues to be out with a bruised heel, Baerga was a major contributor last night.
He singled in the second and came all the way around to score on Matt Cepicky’s double, scored again in the third on Cepicky’s two-run double and saved his best for the sixth when he launched his first homer and only the Nationals’ second three-run blast of the season.
“It was big because [the Phillies] kept coming back,” Baerga said. “It looked like it was going to be easy for us, but in this ballpark, you never know what’s going to happen. They can come back at any time.”
The hosts did, scoring three runs of their own in the sixth against a suddenly inefficient Washington bullpen.
When Drese (3-1) couldn’t retire the only batter he faced in the inning, he was replaced by left-hander Joey Eischen. When Eischen couldn’t retire either of the two batters he faced, he was replaced by Luis Ayala. And when Ayala surrendered a deep blast off the center-field wall by Ryan Howard, he needed a perfect relay from Brad Wilkerson to Jamey Carroll to Brian Schneider to nail the tying run at the plate and preserve an 8-7 lead.
It was the play of the game, and it seemed to turn the tide for the Nationals.
“They tie the game there, and it’s a different story probably,” Wilkerson said. “But we kept the lead, and our bullpen closed down after that point.”
Give Gary Majewski the bulk of the credit for that. The rookie right-hander got out of a first-and-third, none-out jam in the seventh and added a 1-2-3 eighth to bridge the gap to closer Chad Cordero.
“Anybody who could stop them from scoring was huge,” Robinson said. “That was very effective pitching.”
So Cordero entered in the ninth, needing three outs to notch his 31st save but knowing in the back of his mind that even the slightest slip could turn into a game-tying home run at this bandbox of a ballpark.
Cordero’s worst nightmare nearly happened. On his second pitch, Ryan Howard launched a high drive to center field. In the Nationals’ dugout, Robinson turned to bench coach Eddie Rodriguez and uttered two words: “Home run.”
Fortunately, not quite. Wilkerson backtracked to the base of the wall, casually stuck his glove up and made the catch right in front of the 401-foot sign.
“A little bit short,” Wilkerson said. “Probably in our ballpark, it would have been 20 or 30 feet short.”
A couple of less tense outs later, the Nationals celebrated not a blowout but their 24th one-run win of the season. Said Robinson: “I guess when we got it close, that’s our kind of game.”
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