Nationals’ losing streak goes to five

LOS ANGELES — These are tenuous times for the Washington Nationals, who after exceeding expectations for the last five months are beginning to show some cracks.

And if they’re not careful, they could lose much of what they have worked so hard to build.

With a 4-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers last night, the Nationals dropped their fifth straight game and 10th in their last 13.

Suddenly, a ballclub that was starting to draw praise around the sport is playing like the team everyone expected to lose 100 games all along.

Washington (58-75) still would need a complete collapse down the stretch to reach triple digits in losses, but Manny Acta wants to make sure his players don’t call it quits early.

“This last month, we’ve got to stick together and continue doing what we’ve been doing,” the manager said before the game. “It could turn into a long month if we don’t do things right.”

Acta hasn’t gathered his troops together for a pep talk just yet — he has held only two team meetings all season — but he has stressed to players in one-on-one conversations the importance of finishing strong.

“You still have to remind them that it’s not over,” he said. “I don’t want to go home thinking that, yeah, we just won more than 40 [games] like everybody thought. I want to have a little more satisfying ending. It’s not going to be easy. We never said it was going to be easy.”

It hasn’t been easy during this losing streak, which was extended last night because of a seventh-inning breakdown.

The Nationals had just tied the game 3-3 on Tony Batista’s pinch-hit homer (the veteran’s first homer since May 21, 2006). It didn’t take long for the Dodgers to climb back on top.

Mark Sweeney doubled off reliever Chris Schroder (1-1), who then walked Rafael Furcal. Left-hander Ray King entered from the bullpen and got Juan Pierre to hit a bouncer up the middle. Shortstop Felipe Lopez, who has misplayed several balls during this series, again couldn’t haul it in and was charged with an error.

Andre Ethier’s subsequent sacrifice fly scored Sweeney with the go-ahead run, and the Los Angeles bullpen shut things down the rest of the way to seal the victory before a crowd of 49,698.

Desperately wanting a win to snap this down cycle, the Nationals welcomed Jason Bergmann back from the disabled list and asked the right-hander to recapture his early season form and give his team a chance to win.

Bergmann, who allowed three runs over six innings, was more satisfactory than stellar, but he surely wasn’t to blame for the eventual loss.

The 25-year-old hurler was staked to a 1-0 lead before he took the mound, and he might have had an even bigger cushion had the Nationals not stranded the bases loaded. Dmitri Young’s RBI double scored Lopez, and Dodgers right-hander Chad Billingsley responded by plunking Austin Kearns and Ryan Church on consecutive pitches.

But Ronnie Belliard popped out to end the inning, leave three men on base and give Bergmann only the slimmest of cushions with which to work.

The right-hander didn’t look sharp early on, and the Dodgers took advantage by scoring two runs in the second (even though Bergmann was only partially responsible). He hurt his own cause when he fielded Jeff Kent’s dribbler down the third-base line and made an ill-advised heave into the second row of the stands for an error.

A walk put runners on first and second, but Bergmann appeared to get out of the jam by inducing a hard grounder to short by Russell Martin. Lopez, though, couldn’t handle the ball to his left, and by the time he threw to second base, it was too late. Martin was awarded a single, and Shea Hillenbrand followed with a two-run single to left.

Bergmann’s biggest mistake came an inning later, when he hung an 0-1 breaking ball to Kent and the Los Angeles cleanup man tagged it to left for a solo homer.

Otherwise, Bergmann was effective and kept his club in the game until he departed following the sixth. His line — three runs, six hits, one walk, one strikeout — was nothing spectacular, but it went into the books as a quality start nonetheless.