DENVER – As demoralizing as the first two legs of this three-city road trip were, the Nationals at least could take some solace knowing the location of their final stop: Coors Field.
Nothing turns a slumping lineup productive like some thin mountain air. And though they had to wait 19 hours for a mid-April snowstorm to pass through before finally opening their weekend series against the Rockies, the Nats happily accepted the much-needed offense that came with it.
Then again, nothing turns an already struggling bullpen into an absolute mess like Coors Field does, which meant not even a 10-run lead this afternoon was truly safe.
Despite getting four opposite-field homers, two of them by rookie Dylan Crews, and a 13-strikeout performance from starter MacKenzie Gore, the Nationals still had to hang on for dear life as their beleaguered bullpen gave up nine runs before closing out a way-too-tense, 12-11 victory.
"You know how many games like that I've seen here?" manager Davey Martinez sighed. "Whew, a lot."
James Wood and Josh Bell joined Crews in taking Colorado rookie Chase Dollander deep, and when Gore matched his career-high with a baker’s dozen strikeouts over six standout innings, Martinez was able to hand over the final three innings of the game to his bullpen, confident even that group could protect a 10-run lead.
That turned out to be wishful thinking. Lucas Sims and Colin Poche combined to retire only two of the eight batters they faced, with two walks and two hit batters combined between them. Martinez had no choice but to bring in setup man Jose A. Ferrer to try to escape the inning, which only turned uglier on a bases-loaded walk and two defensive mistakes, one of them Alex Call’s misplay of a tailing line drive to left that allowed three runs to score and the Rockies to complete an eight-run rally.
"You've really got to throw strikes here," Martinez said. "You can't walk guys. No free passes. And you've got to play good defense. Those are the two things that are going to hurt you in this ballpark. They came in, hit some batters, didn't throw strikes. Then the next thing you know, the wheels fell off. The good thing is, we had Ferrer and then (Kyle) Finnegan to close out the game for us. But we've got to throw strikes."
Ferrer would settle things down with a 1-2-3 eighth, aided by Crews’ diving catch in right field. Finnegan would close out the ninth for his seventh save in as many tries, but did give up a two-out RBI triple to Mickey Moniak that put the tying run 90 feet away.
"Big innings tend to be contagious," Finnegan said. "I think we've seen that this week around the league, especially. There's been some crazy numbers put up. At 12-2, I'm just relaxing, watching the game. And then you start to see things develop. I started loosening up a little earlier than usual today."
Crews’ numbers entering this series weren’t pretty. He was batting .140 and slugging .140, having yet to produce even one extra-base hit through 16 games played. His peripherals weren’t great, either, but there was just enough solid contact mixed in there to suggest he had been the victim of at least some bad luck, underscored by his low .205 batting average on balls in play.
Maybe the rookie just needed a matchup with an old foe from his college days, the location, though, switching to the best hitters’ park in the major leagues.
Crews faced Dollander twice in SEC play, going a pedestrian 1-for-5 with a double in those high-profile LSU-Tennessee showdowns in 2022-23. They were drafted seven spots apart from each other, the Nationals using the No. 2 pick to take Crews after the Pirates took LSU ace Paul Skenes first overall, then the Rockies snagging Dollander with the No. 9 pick.
"He's an unbelievable pitcher, one of the best, in college and even now," Crews said. "He's one of the best rookie arms, I think, coming in. In college, it was like Skenes and him at one point. Those were the two guys that were the faces of college baseball pitching."
Whether it was familiarity, whether it was the thin air, whether it was something entirely different, Crews finally looked the part of an elite hitter today. He pounced on a 2-0 cutter from Dollander in the top of the second and sent the ball flying 407 feet into the home bullpen in right-center for his first homer and first two RBI of the season.
Three innings later, Crews practically duplicated the feat. He took a 1-0 fastball from Dollander to the exact same part of the ballpark, this one traveling 428 feet for another two-run homer to complete the biggest day of his nascent big league career.
"We knew he's that guy that can hit the ball gap-to-gap, hit home runs," Martinez said. "It was a great day for him. Hopefully we keep him going."
And then just for good measure, Crews added a double in the top of the seventh, giving him 10 total bases on the afternoon. (He entered with only eight total bases on the season.)
"I think good things are happening with my swing when I'm driving the ball to right field," he said. "That's kind of how I've been, really, my whole life, even in college, being able to drive to the right-center gap. Me and my hitting coaches have been working on it every single day. Use this as momentum, and keep going forward with this."
Crews was hardly a one-man show. He had plenty of help from his teammates, who used a similar approach to take down Dollander by going the other way for power.
Bell tried to do it in his first at-bat, just getting under a pitch and winding up with a lazy fly ball to left. He figured things out his next time up, driving a fastball over the left field wall for his third homer of the year. And that merely set up the biggest blast of them all later in the inning.
Victimized by three consecutive bad defensive plays – one of them of his own making – Dollander had to face Wood with two on and two out in the fourth. He paid the price when Wood mashed a 1-0 fastball 426 feet to left-center for his seventh homer of the year, five of them hit in that particular direction.
So it was that a Nationals lineup that couldn’t buy a big hit since last weekend in Miami exploded for four opposite-field homers in the first four-plus innings of this first game in Colorado.
"We did a better job today of: 1) getting the ball in the zone, and 2) staying on the baseball," Martinez said. "We talked about it before the game: When we do that, we can hit. Hopefully, those guys all learned something today and they can come out tomorrow and do the same thing."
As bad as the pitching was here today, one man wasn’t fazed in the least by the conditions. Gore brushed it all off with a dominant performance that rivaled his Opening Day gem against the Phillies.
The left-hander was victimized only once, in the bottom of the second. After a two-out walk of Jacob Stallings that included a pair of borderline calls that didn’t go his way, Gore served up a two-run homer to Mickey Moniak. He had no more trouble the rest of his day, baffling the Rockies’ hitters.
Gore finished with 13 strikeouts on 104 pitches, 28 of which were swings-and-misses. Fourteen of those came on his curveball, a pitch that is not supposed to be effective at high altitude but appeared to be in peak form on this afternoon in which everyone else who picked up a baseball struggled to survive.
"I've pitched here before, understanding what the ball does, and what to not try fight and make the ball do," Gore said. "Getting it to a spot was really more important than trying to make it move a lot here. It's really just because I've thrown here before and understood what I needed to do."