Time: 3:07
Attendance: 25,915
For some reason, this game seemed to last much longer than
three hours, so much so that I got ahead of myself by an inning, thinking that
the game was over when the home team was retired in the 8th. (It
was, in a practical sense, but technically there was one more inning to get
through.)
Things were close for a while. Patrick Corbin got things off
on the right foot by retiring the visitors on an ultra-efficient 7 pitches,
while Justin Verlander had to expend considerably more effort in the bottom of
the first, with two walks and two strikeouts. Neither team could push across a
run until the top of the 5th, when Corbin walked Chas McCormick with
one out and weak-hitting catcher Martín Maldonado sent a fat pitch into the
visitors’ bullpen for a two-run lead. Corbin’s relapse into gopheritis turned
out to be the main story of the game; after leading the NL by allowing 37 homers
in 2021, he had served up only one in his previous seven starts this year. Today,
however, he went on to give up a solo shot to Yuli Gurriel in the 6th
and a two-run McCormick blast after walking the leadoff man in the top of the 7th,
ending his afternoon. Austin Voth relieved him and only managed to make things
worse, giving up two more runs after serving up three straight singles followed
by a bases-loaded walk. José Altuve added a loud punctuation mark leading off
the top of the 9th by sending Paolo Espino’s first pitch out of the
park.
Verlander earned his fifth win of the season (Corbin is now
0-6) by getting through five frames on 107 pitches. Four Houston relievers
completed the shutout, with the Nats managing only four hits after their 13-run
explosion the previous evening.
Twitter duly noted that, during pre-game introductions, the
baseball-savvy Washington fan base booed home plate umpire Angel Hernandez
almost as loudly as they did Altuve and Alex Bregman, the two most prominent
holdovers from Houston’s trashcan-banging 2017 cheating scandal.
Traffic wasn’t too bad coming down, although on the way back
there was a huge backup on the GW Parkway waiting to get onto the Beltway for
the second straight Sunday game. We had a filling lunch at CIRCA Bistro (chicken
panini for me), a block away from the park. Thanks to problems with the concession
stand systems, which by mid-game weren’t even able to accept credit cards, I also
wound up with a free soft pretzel, nice and hot no less. That wasn’t the only system
hiccup, as the ubiquitous 106.7 radio lanyards broadcast was running several
seconds behind the actual action.
No comments:
Post a Comment