Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Quick Demise
SAN FRANCISCO - The Washington Nationals slipped the noose, for a day anyway.
Their previous playoff game had stretched from Saturday evening into Sunday morning, 18 torturous innings that ended with a soul-destroying home run by a San Francisco Giants hacker. It looked then as if this team, which had lost both games at its home stadium, had commenced the walk up to the gallows.
When this inside-the-Beltway team arrived Monday at glorious AT&T Park, with its palm trees and shimmering bay backdrop, the giant Coca-Cola bottle slide and the ambience of spring break at Oberlin, it looked like 25 guys primed to expire.
If the Nationals lost, the narrative would come prepackaged: The National League's top winning team was tight, tense and Type A. As the N.L. team with the best record, the Nationals had acted entitled and arrogant. They had committed the thought crime of thinking they were really good.
The Giants, meanwhile, grooved on a postseason winning streak that had reached 10 games and the cloudless sky mojo.
Except baseball is not a morality play but a game composed of provisional bounces, throws, swings, lurches and guesses. And the Washington Nationals emerged the 4-1 winner. That victory came as a reminder that in a best-of-five series, momentum is a mercurial substance, to be handled with care.
Doug Fister, the lanky Nationals pitcher with the peek-a-boo delivery, said afterward that his team 'got some momentum tonight.' Probably best just to say it's down to a two-win series for the Nationals.
For much of the game, the Nationals' batters appeared as mired in their hitting miasma as when last seen early Sunday. The middle of their order started Monday with statistics that called to mind a midnight horror flick: Batters 3 through 5 sported batting averages of .100, .100, .100. Then came wunderkind Bryce Harper at .182.
Center fielder Denard Span opened the game with a swinging strikeout. Jason Werth, the Nationals' longhaired and bearded biker dude of a right fielder, struck out too. In the next inning, Harper hit a laser beam of a line drive, and it bounced off Madison Bumgarner's glove and took two hops into the shortstop's glove. Bumgarner, the Giants' left-handed pitcher, looked like a man pitching out of a Barcalounger, slinging an effortless assortment of fastballs, sliders and curves.
The unraveling came innocuously and suddenly. There was a single, and a walk. Bumgarner still appeared in command. The most unlikely man on the team to bunt, their bulky catcher, laid down a beauty. Bumgarner made the inexplicable decision to try to throw out the lead runner at third and threw wide of the bag. Pablo Sandoval, the rotund third baseman, made the inexplicable decision to remain anchored to third base. Like a runaway beach ball the ball bounced and bounced out through the left-field bullpen.
Two Nationals came around to score.
Sandoval redeemed himself later in the inning as, like a walrus gone momentarily airborne, he flew through the air and caught a little pop-up of a bunt. But it was too late; air was pumped back into the deflated tire that was the Nationals.
The Giants brought in relief pitcher Jean Machi, who is built like a beer keg on legs. He got through an inning, before Harper, whose youth and wired intensity causes him to be booed mercilessly on the road, flicked his rattlesnake quick bat. A Machi fastball disappeared, traveling over the right-field fence and out of stadium.
Afterward, the narrative police sought out Bruce Bochy. Wasn't this your chance? Isn't the next game (the last game of the series in San Francisco) a must-win? With his gray mustache and tired eyes tucked beneath the beak of his Giants hat, Bochy looks and sounds a bit like an old cowpoke.
He shrugged. 'I don't know how many times I've heard down the stretch in September, 'must-win' and all that,' he said. 'They are all important wins.'
Then Harper walked into the interview room in his white flip-flops, the eye black thick as warpaint under his eyes. He stares intently during questions and talks in quick torrents of words. He'd had a couple of terrific defensive plays, making a shoestring catch with the ball swirling round his glove like a martini mixer.
'We know that coming in today, get three runs off Bumgarner definitely was huge and being able to get that momentum swing to us a little bit is definitely huge,' he said.
Again, that momentum claim; maybe, perhaps, could be. There are at most two games left. Cast against the background of a 162-game season, that's a blink, a quantum burp. These teams spent about the same amount of money on their teams, and scored and gave up more or less the same number of runs.
Matt Williams, the Nationals manager, was asked about momentum. His eyes dart here and there and his demeanor is best described as Zen nervous. 'We find ourselves in the same position we were today,' he said. 'If we lose tomorrow, then it's all over. So y'know, we're in the same spot.'
Which is to say on the steps to the gallows but with the possibility of another reprieve.
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