By the time the lights flickered off above left field at Nationals Park, any chance at timely symbolism was already gone. The energy supplied by a young team on the rebound and the unlikely battery of a gutsy left-hander and a well-traveled catcher had, at least for one night, already been sucked out of the ballpark.
What was left was a speedbump of a game that ended the Washington Nationals’ four-game winning streak and derailed John Lannan’s recent streak of brilliance. The Nationals went home with an 11-4 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates and Lannan’s scoreless streak ended at 21 innings after he surrendered six runs in the third inning.
Throwing to catcher Wil Nieves for the fourth consecutive start, Lannan (2-3) looked shaky even before that. He hit Nate McLouth to start the game, and gave up two hits and a walk in the first two innings. The 23-year-old showed a willingness to throw inside early and often, but left too many pitches out over the plate for that strategy to be effective.
“He just didn’t have it. He’s human. I’m not expecting him every five days to go out there and throw seven scoreless innings for us,” manager Manny Acta said. “His location just wasn’t there, and whenever he made some decent pitches, they fouled it off and ended up running his pitch count up until they got the pitch they could do some damage with.”
McLouth started the third inning by pulling the ninth pitch of his at-bat — a belt-high fastball — off the right-field wall for a double. Lannan walked Jason Bay two batters later, and Ryan Doumit followed him with a single. Both would eventually score, and after the next two batters reached on a single and an error by Felipe Lopez, Jose Bautista crushed a 1-2 pitch to center for the first of his two homers.
“It was a fastball right over the middle,” Nieves said. “[We wanted] a sinker, something moving away from him, and it just stayed straight.”
Lannan’s final line had a little bit of everything: six hits, five earned runs, two walks, a wild pitch, a hit batter, a balk, a strikeout and 85 pitches, all in three innings. The Nationals scored a run in the third inning and three in the fourth — an inning split by an electrical failure that knocked out several banks of the stadium’s lights and caused a 25-minute delay — but the rally wasn’t good enough to make the game close when the Pirates hammered Lannan’s replacements.
Mike O’Connor allowed four runs in 32/3 innings, giving up Bautista’s second homer of the night in the fifth inning, and Joel Hanrahan gave up a run on three hits in 12/3 innings. Like Lannan, both pitchers threw a wild pitch that advanced a runner who would eventually score.
All that helped the Pirates pad a 7-4 lead with four more runs after the fourth inning, while Washington only mustered one hit and failed to draw a walk after the fourth.
By the time the Nationals came up in the ninth inning, many of the 26,001 in attendance had already left. Most of the fans who stayed chanted, “We want fireworks,” after the team announced its Friday night post-game pyrotechnics would be canceled if the game went past 10:50 as part of an understanding with the neighborhood around the stadium.
Team president Stan Kasten said workers at the Nationals’ new ballpark were still learning their way around the electrical systems, but didn’t have any better idea of what went wrong with the lights last night than that.
Like Lannan, it was still a work in progress.
“It’s important that you guys remember [he’s still developing],” Acta said. “Because we know that.”
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