Manager Matt Williams presented Stephen Strasburg with an opportunity Wednesday afternoon, a chance to burnish his résumé and his reputation. Strasburg wants the Washington Nationals to lean on him, and he wants the ball at moments like the one that arose at the start of the eighth inning. He had thrown 106 pitches. The Nationals clung to a one-run lead. The top of an imposing lineup loomed. And Williams sent him to the mound.
The moment, fit for an ace, slipped through Strasburg’s hands. The Nationals leaned instead on their bullpen, the most trustworthy sector of their team. Jerry Blevins and Tyler Clippard each recorded one crucial out after Strasburg left, handing Strasburg a win and the Nationals a 3-2 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
In his return from the disabled list, catcher Wilson Ramos went 1 for 3 with a walk, a double and a sacrifice fly in the fifth inning that scored the game-winning run. The Nationals clobbered former teammate Dan Haren in the first inning to erase another early deficit, and then Strasburg settled in.
After the Dodgers scored two runs on four consecutive singles in the first inning, Strasburg retired 20 of the final 25 batters he faced. In total, he allowed two runs over 71/ 3 innings, striking out six and allowing seven hits, all of them singles.
Strasburg cruised until the eighth, when he emerged from the Nationals dugout to face the top of the Dodgers order. Dee Gordon led off with a perfect bunt single between Strasburg and second baseman Danny Espinosa. After Carl Crawford lined out to left, Williams let Strasburg face Hanley Ramirez. He walked on a change-up in the dirt, Strasburg’s 114th pitch.
With left-hander Adrian Gonzalez up, Williams took the ball from Strasburg and summoned Blevins, who has been one of the most reliable pieces of a reliable bullpen. On the 10th pitch of the confrontation, Blevins threw a 91 mph sinker on Gonzalez’s fists. He popped up foul to third base.
Blevins had done his job, and Williams called for Tyler Clippard. He threw one pitch to Yasiel Puig. He hit a rocket to center field and tossed his bat like a pencil. Denard Span had played him perfectly, and his catch stranded both runners.
In the ninth, Rafael Soriano fired his 25th consecutive scoreless inning, a streak dating back to last season, for his seventh save in seven chances.
In the fifth, Ramos came to the plate in a moment fit for a storybook — bases loaded, one out, crowd on its feet. Ramos drilled Haren’s 3-2 cutter to right field, deep enough for Span to score standing up, even on Puig’s jet-fueled throw home from right field. It may not have been dramatic, but Ramos’s line out gave the Nationals a 3-2 lead.
Adam LaRoche is in the Nationals’ lineup for one reason. He cannot run on his gimpy quadriceps muscle, and his fielding, deemed worthy of a Gold Glove two years ago, may be affected, too. But he can still clobber the ball, and that is what the Nationals needed from him in the first inning.
LaRoche came to the plate with runners on second and third, the product of Span’s single and Jayson Werth’s bullet to the base of the center field fence. After LaRoche fouled off three 3-2 pitches, Haren fired a cutter inside. LaRoche crushed it down the right field line. He could only hobble to first base, settling for a single even after the ball banged against the fence. But two runs scored, erasing the early deficit.
Up came Ramos for his first at-bat since opening day. On the pitch first he saw, Ramos blasted a cutter off the 377-foot mark on the left-center field fence. The Nationals, though, would leave the bases loaded.
They had needed those runs to tie the game. With one out in the first, Crawford bounced a single up the middle. Ramirez rolled a hard grounder through the left side. Gonzalez ripped a groundball to the right side. LaRoche reached to grab it – a double play would end the inning. LaRoche’s quad injury may have prevented him from crouching as he normally would, and the ball scooted under his glove, into right field for an RBI single.
The inning continued, and Puig somehow hooked a low-and-away change-up into left field, scoring another run. With the Nationals trailing, 2-0, and only one out in the first, pitching coach Steve McCatty trudged to the mound. Strasburg retired the next two hitters, but the damage had been piled atop the other first-inning horrors of his season.
In eight starts, Strasburg has allowed 11 runs in the first inning, eight of them earned. Strasburg has not been much better in the second, when he has allowed five runs, all earned.
Once he escapes the beginning of the game, he has dominated. After the second inning this year, Strasburg has allowed five runs in 50 innings – a 0.89 ERA. In the first two innings, Strasburg owns a 7.31 ERA.