SAN FRANCISCO — It ended here, on a perfect starless night by the bay. The Washington Nationals’ legitimate run at the World Series. Their National League-leading 96-win season. Their belief that Tuesday night’s red-eye flight to Washington, D.C., would be one of excitement and momentum and confidence building up to Game 5, not heartbreak, that oh-so-familiar heartbreak.
It ended when Wilson Ramos hit a routine grounder to second base and was thrown out at first. The San Francisco Giants swarmed the field as red fireworks soared over the jumbotron in center field. The Nationals hung on the railing of the dugout, watching the mob at the pitcher’s mound without words or visible signs of emotions. At the end of the bench, Aaron Barrett sat down and adjusted his cap.
The Nationals lost, 3-2, in Game 4 of the National League Division Series on Tuesday night, bringing their season to an abrupt and crushing end.
They lost because Gio Gonzalez and Anthony Rendon watched a bunt roll peacefully down the third-base line. They lost because the middle of their batting order once again could not produce runs. And they lost because Barrett, the team’s only true rookie, threw a wild pitch with the bases loaded in the seventh inning, allowing the decisive run to score.
After all of that, manager Matt Williams addressed the team in the middle of a quiet visiting clubhouse.
“I told them that I’m proud of their effort,” Williams said. “We established a way to go about this game in spring training, and we accomplished that goal. We played the way we wanted to play and did a lot of things right. So, you know, it’s tender and it’s bitter and all of those things. But I’m proud of them. I’m proud of the way they went about it.”
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Nearly two years ago, Jayson Werth hit a walk-off homer in a similar do-or-die situation to keep the season alive. This time, it looked like Bryce Harper might be the one filling that role. He crushed a mammoth solo homer beyond the right-field concourse and into McCovey Cove to tie the game in the seventh inning.
But more than an hour later, Harper was walking across the clubhouse to Werth’s locker and giving him a hug. Werth declined to speak to reporters after the game through a team spokesperson.
This year, there will be no Game 5.
“They were the better team for these four games,” center fielder Denard Span said. “Do I feel like they are the better team? No. But they were the better team for this series.
“We just came up short. Point-blank. Period.”
And there were many reasons for that. At the top of the list was the bottom of the seventh inning, which went from crazy to bonkers to nearly unfathomable in a matter of minutes.
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It began with reliable left-hander Matt Thornton recording one out, allowing singles to Joe Panik and Buster Posey, and then promptly exiting the game. Williams could have used Tyler Clippard, Drew Storen, Craig Stammen, Rafael Soriano or even Stephen Strasburg in that moment. Instead Barrett, the team’s only rookie, entered.
“Those are our seventh-inning guys,” Williams explained afterwards. “That’s how we set this up. We had two lefties at the top of the inning, and if we got to the righties, we were going to go with Barrett. That’s what he’s done for us all year long. We are certainly not going to use our closer in the seventh inning. So that’s why we went with it.”
A right-handed specialist, Barrett was first tasked with striking out right-handed hitter Hunter Pence. He walked him instead. That brought up Pablo Sandoval, a switch-hitter who has had tremendous success from the left side this season. Barrett threw a fastball for a ball. Then a slider for a called strike. Then another fastball, which skipped to the dirt and past Ramos to the backstop. Panik scored. The other runners advanced.
“It was [strange], how we scored, but that’s our way sometimes,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. “We scratch and paw for runs. And we got a break.”
And that was just the beginning.
Barrett threw another ball to Sandoval, bringing the count to 3-1. With first base unoccupied, the Nationals decided to intentionally walk Sandoval to bring up Brandon Belt. The problem? When Barrett lobbed the pitch to Ramos, he airmailed it over the catcher’s head.
“I just didn’t even feel it come out of my hand,” Barrett said. “I honestly have no idea what happened.”
Well, what happened next was this: Posey raced home from third. Ramos scrambled to gather the ball. He turned, fired and hit Barrett in stride. Barrett leaned and applied the tag at his feet. Out. Bochy walked to the plate and asked for a video review. After 1 minute and 57 seconds, the call stood. Out.
While all of this was unfolding, Soriano was hastily warming up in the bullpen. After the review was over, he entered the game and Nationals fans from San Francisco to D.C. cringed. The former closer hadn’t been his previously dominant self in a month.
So naturally, he retired Belt on one pitch.
The Nationals were in business. But they would have been in even better shape had it not been for a disastrous second inning, one that featured two pivotal fielding miscues.
The first occurred with one on and one out, when little-used Juan Perez hit a slow chopped to the mound. The ball rolled past Gonzalez’s mitt, ricocheted off his right foot and spun into the infield for a single. Gonzalez was charged with the error.
Then came the play that Williams referred to afterwards as “the one,” presumably as in “the one that ruined the second inning.”
Pitcher Ryan Vogelsong laid down a bunt to advance the runners, dropping the ball neatly in the grass midway down the third-base line. Rendon charged it. Gonzalez charged it. Then they both stopped and stared at it, leaving the bases loaded with one out.
“I couldn’t hear Rendon,” Gonzalez said. “I swore he must’ve said, ’I got it! I got it!’ But it was ’One! One! One!’ So that’s my fault, 100 percent. I should’ve done a better job getting those outs and obviously it’s a different ballgame.”
Gonzalez walked the next hitter, Gregor Blanco, on four pitches to bring home one run, and another scored on Panik’s chopper to first base to give the Giants a quick 2-0 lead.
Gonzalez was nearly absolved of those mistakes by Harper, who almost single-handedly dragged the Nationals back into the game. He doubled down the left-field line in the fifth inning to score Ian Desmond, who had broken up Vogelsong’s no-hitter with a leadoff single. Then he hit the tying homer out of AT&T Park.
The rest of Washington’s lineup went 2 for 28 (.071) on Tuesday. In the series, the heart of the order — Werth, LaRoche and Desmond — hit a combined 5 for 53 (.094).
“We all sucked. Bottom line,” said Span, who was 2 for 19 in the series. “Other than Harper. Rendon, too. But for the rest of us, we just didn’t do what we needed to do. It’s going to take me a while to get over that, because I’ve been waiting my whole life for the opportunity to play on this stage and didn’t step up.”
In the end, there were only empty lockers. There were future free agents hugging teammates and shaking hands. There were large duffel bags with Nationals logos being wheeled out of a clubhouse for the last time this year. There was disappointment and reflection, but also forethought.
“The first step is to get there, and we’ve done that two of the last three years,” Desmond said. “We’ve got a lot of talent, a lot of good ballplayers in here, a lot of good ballplayers that are under contract and coming back for awhile. The window isn’t closed, but it is closing.”
A sense of finality lingered in the clubhouse as the Nationals showered and dressed, tied their ties and grabbed their bags and walked to the team bus. After months of taking it one day at a time, there were suddenly no more days left.
• Tom Schad can be reached at tschad@washingtontimes.com.
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