The Nationals lost again last night to the Marlins 6-5. After leading for most of the game, they let the win slip away again with poor plate execution and silly fielding mistakes. The attitude of this team has changed this season. They aren’t the spunky, energetic, fighters we saw last year. With a 5-13 record, the worst in baseball still, and a team that isn’t hitting, when does an early season slump become a real problem? Zimmerman still says, “It’ll pass, and we’ll start winning, and everything will be fine.” That’s nice, but when Zimmy? There seems to be this complacency with losing, and a thinking that winning games will come eventually. It’d be better if winning could happen now and we got rid of this “wait and see” attitude.

The Nationals had numerous chances to win the game last night. Zimmerman was at the plate twice with runners in scoring position will less than two outs and failed both times to bring them in. He is now 1-23 with runners in scoring position, not a pretty stat when you are batting third. Austin Kearns continued to struggle also. Last night his at the plate slump carried over into right field where he missed a couple of catches he usually would have made. Kearns did come up with a big base hit in the ninth to tie the game, but those kind of hits from him are few and far between this season. Other silly mistakes cost the Nats chances also. Felipe Lopez, who is looking much better hitting lead off, had two errors at second last night. Additionally in a silly base running move, Cristian Guzman ran off second forgetting there was only one out, and cost the team another chance to score. Estrada also had an error on a throw to second. With his arm not back to full strength, the fact that he’s never really been able to throw out runners, we may be seeing a lot of E-2’s from him this season, especially in the NL East where we face Ramirez, Reyes and Rollins all the time.

Shawn Hill made his 2008 debut last night. Hill did pretty well until the sixth inning when he started to fall behind on the count, and gave up key base hits. It was nice to see Hill back on the mound. He cruised through the first five innings with little problem. Shawn said after the game that he didn’t feel any pain last night, and the discomfort he has isn’t something he can’t pitch through, so good news there. As usual though, Hill blamed himself for last night’s loss, “You got a 3-1 lead, I’m not going through the heart of the order at that point, I’ve got to do a better job of maintaining that lead.” Don’t beat yourself up too much Shawn, your teammates didn’t help you out much either.

I hope I see some better baseball this afternoon for the last game against the Marlins.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 10:50 am and is filed under Game Recaps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.