Saturday, the Nationals stumbled onto something they hadn’t ever found in the playoffs before: a five-run inning. An offense that had dominated all regular season was sputtering on only 4 hits in 16 innings until the eighth. But in that inning, when Bryce Harper sent shockwaves of violence and grace into a baseball on a 3-1 pitch from Carl Edwards Jr. to tie game 2 (and eventually, the series), the Nationals saw or hoped they saw, something click in the franchise that hadn’t before.
The Nationals show a glimpse of a real postseason team
Sunday’s Say Hey Baseball talks about baseballs singing Aladin songs
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Harper hadn’t looked Harper-esque in the postseason, extending back to his return from missing 40-plus games. He looked 2015-stiff and wasn’t seeing the ball well, with 9 strikeouts in his last 27 plate appearances, and he hadn’t been able to drive anything either, with only four hits and no extra-base hits in the same timeframe. He was faltering enough for Joe Maddon to be comfortable leaving in a righty to face him. The blast against the RHP was Harper’s first homer in exactly two months, and it didn’t just waltz out of the park: It left his bat at 109 mph and landed just a few rows away from the concourse in the second deck. It was a surprise to anyone who had been watching him, but postgame, Jayson Werth said, “He can wake up with the best of them.” If the Nationals want any shot at the series, they have to hope that’s true.
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Ryan Zimmerman, on the other hand, had been consistently hung out to dry by Maddon. Maddon walked Harper six times to get to Zimmerman, who would leave 14 runners on base, in 2016, according to Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post. Since the start of last season, Zimmerman has a -3 wRC+ against Maddon. He was thwarted by Maddon often enough to almost make his game-clinching dinger more a victory over Maddon than it was over Mike Montgomery, the pitcher.
If any, Zimmerman’s was the swing that could have lifted something in D.C. Washington, specifically Dusty Baker, thought it felt the weight lifted after Jose Lobaton’s Game 3 homer in 2016, but that swing never really saw a follow-up that could prove that the Nationals had figured out how to perform consistently in the postseason.
Saturday’s eighth inning had follow-ups. Not only was Harper’s moonshot longer and louder than Lobaton’s, it also had support: a base hit from Daniel Murphy, a walk from Anthony Rendon and Zimmerman’s wall-scraper. They are the core of the Nationals lineup, players who are supposed to perform, and players whose success is far more dependable moving forward than that of a backup catcher. They performed like the Nationals who finished fifth in runs scored.
The Diamondbacks are standing seven feet deep in a grave that’s been dug by Dodgers bats, and the dirt will be brushed over them unless Zack Greinke can postpone their funeral. The Astros and the Indians are both a win away from taking the division titles and moving onto the ALCS, which should be electric, postseason-made matchups. But in terms of the division series, the Cubs and the Nationals are the biggest toss-up. How can the Cubs perform with the World Series drought monkey off their backs? And can the Nationals release theirs back into the wild?
- The shot that best captures the emotion from Harper’s monstrosity of a home run that fulfilled everyone’s wildest dreams and wishes isn’t even from his bomb, it’s from Ryan Zimmerman’s. But the emotion packed into it speaks for all of us. (Cubs fans excepted.) Though Zimmerman’s was the final blow, Harper’s baseball sailed high and far and fast enough that is probably got caught up in its own rendition of “A Whole New World.”
- Vin Scully dubbed Yasiel Puig the Wild Horse in 2013 when Puig made his debut. Puig has optimized that nickname in the NLDS. I’ve never been closer to understanding people with horse passion than I am now.
- The Dodgers scored a lot of runs. The Diamondbacks almost kinda came close to scoring as many, but then they didn’t. Now the Dodgers are up 2-0 in the series.
- Everyone knows there are like 16 versions of every player, the good one, the bad one, the had-his-pregame-roast-beef-sandwich one … Robbie Ray was the 2016 version of himself on Saturday, and it didn’t help the Diamondbacks.
- There are cliches about streaming important games at weddings or church or wherever if you’d otherwise have to miss. But sometimes you have to get creative. Sometimes you have to have a game narrated to you by an airline’s Twitter account.
- A Cubs fan made an incredible grab of the non-interfering variety on an Anthony Rizzo two-run dinger, much to the dismay of all the Nats fans around him.
- The Yankees are currently down in the ALDS 2-0 to the Indians. But these Yankees aren’t those of the past.
- The Yankees are set to match up against the Indians today. Some wise bullet point in a newsletter somewhere may have told you the Yankees are down 2-0 to the Indians in that series. One of the reasons for that is mistakes. Rank ‘em.
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