Fifth inning dooms Nats in loss to Dodgers (updated)

LOS ANGELES – The ball came off Miguel Vargas’ bat at 92.8 mph, a sharp grounder to the left side of second base. CJ Abrams shuffled several steps to his left and put his glove down for what he hoped would be the start of a 6-4-3 double play that would help Trevor Williams get through a fifth scoreless inning at Dodger Stadium.

Abrams did not make the play. The ball squirted away from the Nationals shortstop, who awkwardly stumbled as he tried to corral it in time to save the play. By the time teammate Luis García finally tracked it down, Vargas was safe at first and Jason Heyward was safe at third, having aggressively advanced 180 feet on the error.

What transpired after that illustrated one of baseball’s great “What if?” scenarios. Williams proceeded to give up six runs before the inning ended, all of them unearned, the decisive sequence in the Nationals’ 6-1 loss to the Dodgers.

If Abrams makes the play and the inning ends a few batters later with no damage, would Williams have continued to dominate? Or would he still have had a nightmare of a time trying to hold down a potent Los Angeles lineup for the third time in the game, no matter what transpired before?

We’ll never know, of course. All we do know is how the bottom of the fifth did play out tonight, and it was especially ugly from the Nats’ perspective.

"My focus was on the double play ball that we didn't turn," manager Davey Martinez said. "We turn that ball, the next guy pops up, he's out of the inning at 60-plus pitches. It was unfortunate, and then things unraveled from there."

Williams had looked exceptionally sharp up to that point, posting four zeroes on the scoreboard on a mere 50 pitches, scattering two singles and a walk. His teammates had given him a slim, 1-0 lead thanks to Abrams’ two-out RBI single in the top of the second, a 112.5-mph laser to right that scored Joey Meneses from third but did lead to Corey Dickerson getting thrown out at the plate after an uber-aggressive send by third base coach Gary DiSarcina.

"I thought it was a great send. It really was," Martinez said. "Two outs in that situation, I thought it was a bang-bang play, and it was a good send."

Williams took the mound for the fifth hoping to make quick work of the bottom of the Dodgers lineup, but he opened the frame by walking Heyward. Vargas then followed with his sharp grounder to short. Abrams, who had not committed an error in 15 games, booted this one, and now the pressure was suddenly on Williams to pitch out of a jam for the first time tonight.

"The infield's pretty fast. I was trying to go two hands with that one, and I kind of tied myself up," Abrams said. "It hurt, for sure. Maybe get out of that inning and win the game, but it happens. I have to learn from it."

Williams got James Outman to fly out to left, but that scored Heyward from third to tie the game 1-1. He got Chris Taylor to ground to third, but Jeimer Candelario and García couldn’t quite turn what would’ve been an inning-ending 5-4-3 double play in time.

So now came the real challenge for Williams, who had to face the top of the lineup for the third time in the game. It’s been a problem area for the right-hander, and it certainly was a problem again tonight.

"That's the beautiful thing about pitching. It's something that I love: The art of pitching," Williams said. "I love trying to get guys out three, four times through the lineup. That's part of the game plan going in. You work with Plan A when Plan A is working great. And as soon as they start to pick up on Plan A, you adjust to Plan B, and you go from there. Unfortunately today, they got the best of us the third time through the lineup."

Did they ever. Mookie Betts singled to left. Freddie Freeman ripped a two-run double to right (remarkably, his franchise-record 17th double this month). Will Smith drew a walk. And then J.D. Martinez mashed an 89-mph fastball from Williams deep to right-center for a three-run homer and a 6-1 lead.

Williams would finish out the inning, needing 40 pitches to finally end the frame, but it was too late to undo the damage. He was pulled after that, finishing with a most unusual pitching line: six runs, all unearned, even though he allowed four hits (two of them for extra bases) and a walk following the Abrams error.

"I need to do better and not let that inning spiral out of control," said Williams, whose ERA actually went down tonight, from 4.32 to 3.93. "I need to pick up CJ there. We all rely on each other that way. It's a learning moment. It's a moment that I let slip out of my hands. But moving forward, I think it's something we're both going to grow from."

None of that may have mattered anyway, because the Nationals lineup again couldn’t string together enough offense at the right times to manage more than one run off Dodgers rookie Bobby Miller or the three relievers who followed him.

They had a chance for a big inning in the top of the second, with three of their five batters notching hits in the inning. None was bigger than Abrams’ two-out knock to right off Miller, but even that didn’t have a happy ending because of Heyward’s routine throw to the plate to nail Dickerson by multiple steps.

Otherwise, the Nats did very little at the plate, leading to only their sixth loss this season by five or more runs. Against a team like the Dodgers, all it took was one little mistake to open the floodgates.

"Definitely, the margin of error is very small," Martinez said. "They're going to come at you. They've got some good hitters. We knew that. And that guy that pitched today did really well. We couldn't get anything going offensively."