Dan Haren spun a gem, and the bats provided enough pop to allow the Nationals to pick up their fifth straight win.
Haren threw six scoreless innings tonight, allowing just a hit and a walk and striking out eight, and Ryan Zimmerman's solo homer and Anthony Rendon's two-run double were enough to give the Nats a 3-0 win over the Mets.
The victory makes Haren 9-13 on the season and gives him two more wins than Stephen Strasburg. Baseball can be a funny game at times.
The Nats are now 22-9 in...
Prior to tonight, the last two times Dan Haren took the mound, his night was over before he could sniff the fourth inning.
Haren allowed nine runs over 2 2/3 innings in a loss to the Mets on Aug. 31, then surrendered five runs over three innings in a loss to the Marlins on Sept. 6.
Tonight, Haren has allowed just one baserunner through his first three frames, holding the Mets hitless and striking out four.
Haren has worked quickly and needed just 42 pitches (27 of which have been strikes) to...
After missing the last four games with left hip inflammation, Bryce Harper is back in the Nationals lineup today, playing left field and hitting cleanup.
Harper went back to D.C. over the weekend to get checked out by Nationals medical director Dr. Wiemi Douoguih. He was told to sit out Monday and Tuesday's games, but took batting practice at Citi Field yesterday and felt well enough to have Davey Johnson write him back in the lineup for tonight's contest.
This will mark just the fourth...
Jordan Zimmermann notched his 17th win last night, most in the National League. Rafael Soriano recorded his 40th save, second-most in the NL.
Jayson Werth leads the league in OPS and slugging percentage, and is one percentage point behind Chris Johnson for the league lead in batting average.
Denard Span has a 21-game hitting streak and has worked his average up to .281. Wilson Ramos has 12 homers and 46 RBIs in just 231 at-bats. Tyler Moore is hitting .388 since his promotion with three...
Prior to last season, the Mets brought in the fence in left and left-center field at Citi Field in order to make the park a bit smaller, and installed what they call the Party City Deck between the new fencing and the old wall that they had out there.
It's an area for fans to hang out during the game and get a unique view just above the fence. And it's also a prime area for souvenirs, especially the last two days.
The Nationals are wearing out that Party City Deck during this series, and...
As teammates, good friends and roommates, Steve Lombardozzi and Tyler Moore are around each other a lot.
That's why, as a joke, an unknown member of the Nationals took Moore's jersey, hat and baseball gloves during the last homestand and put them in Lombardozzi's locker.
When Moore walked into the Nats clubhouse and made his way toward his locker, he noticed his stuff was gone. The confused Moore started spinning around looking, trying to figure out what was going on, only to find his gear...
The Nationals will open their 2014 season with 15 straight games against division opponents, the first three of which will be in New York against the Mets.
After kicking off the season on the road, the Nats will return for their home opener on Friday, April 4, to be played against the Braves.
The Nats have an 11-game homestand - their longest of the season - in April, including four games apiece against the Cardinals and Padres, and a three-game interleague series against the Angels.
Other...
It's been a bit of a strange season for Gio Gonzalez.
When Gonzalez has been good, he's been really, really good. See: last night's one-hit shutout of the Mets in a 9-0 Nationals win. That was dominance, and it sure looked for a while there like Gonzalez had a legitimate shot at a no-hitter the way he was throwing.
But on the rare occasion when Gonzalez has struggled this season, he's really struggled.
The left-hander has allowed more than four earned runs in a start five times this...
The Nationals' bats have made all the big noise tonight. But Gio Gonzalez quietly hasn't allowed a hit through six innings.
Gonzalez has struck out seven and retired 17 straight as we go to the seventh.
The only Mets hitter to reach base tonight was Daniel Murphy, who got on via a one-out walk in the first.
Gonzalez has thrown 73 pitches, 52 for strikes.
He's needed to sit through a couple long half-innings when the Nats have done some offensive damage, but it hasn't seemed to bug the...
Denard Span extended his hitting streak to 20 games in style.
Then Ryan Zimmerman kept his hot streak going with some flash, as well.
Span and Zimmerman hit back-to-back homers to open tonight's game, giving the Nationals, and starter Gio Gonzalez, an early 2-0 lead.
Span's shot was a laser to right field that cleared the wall and skipped up into the netting above the bullpens. It's his fourth of the season and takes away whatever drama there might have been thanks to Span's hitting...
With Bryce Harper still out of the Nationals' lineup with a hip injury, Tyler Moore will play left field tonight in the opener of the Nats' four-game series against the Mets.
Gio Gonzalez will oppose Mets right-hander Carlos Torres, who the Nats got to for eight earned runs in just three innings in a 14-1 win back on July 28.
For the Nats
CF Denard Span
3B Ryan Zimmerman
RF Jayson Werth
SS Ian Desmond
1B Adam LaRoche
C Wilson Ramos
LF Tyler Moore
2B Anthony Rendon
LHP Gio...
I was out of town over the weekend, so I missed catching Tanner Roark's first major league start live, but I did cue it up on the DVR once I got home.
What I saw was another really strong outing from an impressive right-hander getting by not just on pure stuff, but on location and aggression.
Roark's six scoreless innings on Saturday add just the latest line to what's been a dominant start to the 26-year-old's major league career. He now has put up a 0.94 ERA over his first 10 outings,...
The Reds keep on winning, and the Nationals' incredibly slim playoff chances keep getting slimmer.
Cincinnati finished off a three-game sweep of the Dodgers last night, marking the Reds' sixth win in their last seven games. The Nats might have gone 4-2 so far on their road trip, but given their current situation, that's pretty much two losses too many.
Twenty games remain on the Nats' schedule. To get to 90 wins, they'll have to go 17-3.
Even if that somehow happens, the Nats would...
The Cardinals didn't help the Nationals out any last night, falling to the Reds to push the Nats a full seven games back of Cincinnati in the wild card chase.
Twenty-three games to go with a seven-game deficit to overcome.
Have at it, Nats. See what you can do.
Over the last couple months, the Nats have seen their relief corps - a group that for the most part was pretty solid in the first half of the season - start to falter.
Rafael Soriano went through a stretch where he was incredibly...
The Nationals have claimed corner infielder Mauro Gomez off waivers from the Blue Jays, giving them another bench option for next season.
The 28-year-old Gomez hit .249 with 29 home runs, 21 doubles, 73 RBI and a .843 OPS in 110 games for Triple-A Buffalo this season. He was designated for assignment by the Blue Jays on Tuesday.
Gomez's 29 homers tied current Nationals shortstop Zach Walters for the most home runs at the Triple-A level this year.
Gomez will not be reporting to the Nationals...
We're getting to that time of year where scoreboard watching becomes a pretty big part of the nightly routine for major league teams still in playoff contention.
Teams like the Nationals can talk all they want about how they're just focused on taking care of their own business. They can say that their concern is just on each game that they play, and that they aren't worried about what's going on around them.
Part of that certainly might be true. The Nats can't get caught up looking in...
PHILADELPHIA - There were jokes all around in the Nationals' clubhouse tonight as players packed up their things for a flight to Miami and monitored the Reds-Cardinals extra-inning game on multiple clubhouse TVs.
The bulk of the chatter was about two defensive gems - the Steve Lombardozzi/Jordan Zimmermann spin-and-scoop at first base to end the seventh inning and keep the game tied, and the Jhonatan Solano sprint-and-tag at the plate in the eighth that kept the Nats on top 3-2.
The play by...
PHILADELPHIA - The Nationals went 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position and left 11 runners on base in tonight's 3-2 win over the Phillies.
Their offense didn't win them this game. Their defense did.
The Nats made a couple huge defensive plays in the late innings tonight, keeping the Phillies off the scoreboard and ensuring their three runs put up on Philadelphia pitching would be enough.
The first defensive gem came in the bottom of the seventh after the Nats had just tied the score at...
PHILADELPHIA - The hope, after last night's slopfest, was that the Nationals and Phillies had gotten all the ugly baseball out of their systems and would put together a clean, smooth ballgame tonight.
That hasn't been the case through the first two innings of play.
The Phillies lead 2-1 going to the third, in a game in which Roy Halladay has already walked four and hit a batter and Jordan Zimmermann has surrendered four hits and a walk of his own.
Halladay has been all over the place,...
PHILADELPHIA - Bryce Harper has played through some hip soreness in each of the first two games of this three-game set with the Phillies, but Harper isn't in the Nationals' lineup tonight for the finale.
Manager Davey Johnson has opted to give Harper the day off to rest his ailing hip, this after Harper admitted to his skipper today that the hip is still "barking."
"I talked to him the last two, three days about how he was feeling, and he gave me the thumbs up," Johnson said. "But he...
