DENVER — It has happened countless times all season, and Frank Robinson has harped about it to his players to no avail. The Washington Nationals just can’t seem to score a run or two without giving two or three right back to the opposition.
And when they do that with the kind of regularity they displayed this weekend at Coors Field, the result is not pretty.
A 13-9 loss to the Colorado Rockies yesterday was only the latest indignity, a fitting cap to a miserable weekend of baseball in which the Nationals suffered a four-game sweep at the hands of a fellow last-place club and did so in embarrassing fashion.
Yesterday’s calamity featured starter Pedro Astacio getting rocked for 21/3 innings, his teammates storming back to tie and then a woefully inexperienced bullpen blowing it.
Put it all together and the Nationals were outscored 43-27 during the series. Add the mid-June, four-game sweep against this same club at RFK Stadium and they finished the season 0-8 against the Rockies while being outscored 78-41.
Robinson insists it’s not possible for one major league team to simply have another’s number, but how then to explain Colorado’s dominance of Washington this year?
“What is there to explain? It’s very simple,” the manager said. “When you don’t play defensively well and you don’t get good pitching, you’re not going to win ballgames. That’s how you explain it.”
The Nationals (61-82) did nothing well over the weekend, especially when it came to a pitching staff that could not help the lineup’s cause. Washington scored a run in 15 different innings in the series (not including a ninth-inning add-on yesterday). Colorado came back to score in the bottom of the same inning 10 times.
“It just takes the air out of you,” Robinson said. “It takes the good feelings about what you just accomplished out of you. And it also puts you kind of back on your heels. No matter what you do, the other team’s going to come back on us. That’s what it does.”
It happened every time the Nationals scored yesterday. They put two runs on the board in the third courtesy of a Nook Logan homer and a Ryan Zimmerman single, then watched as Astacio and Beltran Perez gave three runs back in the bottom of the inning. They scored five in the fifth to tie the game 7-7, then watched as Ryan Wagner gave one back on a walk, a wild pitch and two singles.
The worst infraction, though, came in the seventh. Logan tripled down the left-field line to score Bernie Castro and tie the game 8-8.
But in the bottom of the inning, rookie reliever Chris Schroder issued a one-out walk to No. 7 hitter Clint Barmes, plunked No. 8 hitter Chris Iannetta and later walked leadoff man Kaz Matsui to load the bases for perennial All-Star Todd Helton.
“There are good walks in baseball, and there are bad walks,” Robinson said. “And we come up with a lot of bad walks. We let the bottom of the lineup set the table for the top of the lineup.”
All of it played right into the Rockies’ hands. Schroder left a 1-0 fastball to Helton over the plate, and the veteran slugger ripped it 428 feet to right for a grand slam. Moments later, Garrett Atkins crushed a solo homer of his own, turning an 8-8 nailbiter into a 13-8 rout.
“I think I left a few balls up and got a little tired,” said Schroder, who has allowed six homers in 19 innings this season. “And the balls, I was leaving them up and away.”
Schroder, a 28-year-old rookie, did find himself in a tough spot, just as most of his bullpen mates did yesterday. Because of Astacio’s quick exit, Robinson needed seven relievers (three rookies) to record 17 outs and keep the game manageable.
“They’re being overexposed,” Robinson said. “They’re going out there much too often, and to expect them to be as effective as they can possibly be, that’s just too much for them.”
With another loss all but assured, the Nationals had little left to shoot for in the final innings yesterday but individual accomplishments. So it was that Alfonso Soriano, who stole his 39th base of the season earlier in the day, took off for second with two outs in the ninth, seeking to become the fourth member of the exclusive 40-40 club.
Soriano swiped the base without even drawing a throw. But he was not awarded a stolen base by the stadium’s official scorer, who instead ruled “defensive indifference” because the Rockies did not make an attempt to throw him out.
Nationals first-base coach Davey Lopes felt otherwise and argued in the clubhouse after the game that Soriano should get credit because the catcher pump-faked a throw and the second baseman made a brief move toward the bag.
“That’s a stolen base no matter how you look at it,” Lopes said.
Soriano was more diplomatic in his assessment of the situation, insisting he’s not trying to go out of his way to record personal milestones.
“They give me the base, so I take it,” he said. “If it’s not [a stolen base], I think I’ve got plenty of chances to make 40-40. If it’s not today, I think I’ve got more days coming.”
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