Nats cap eventful night with tight win at Wrigley (updated)

Maybe it's Wrigley Field. The Friendly Confines just seem to bring out the highest of drama when the Nationals are in town, and have so for many years now.

From epic playoff games to devastating walk-off grand slams to intentional walk records to wild back-and-forth contests, the Nationals and Cubs have experienced it all at the corner of Clark and Addison streets on Chicago's North Side.

Add tonight's 4-3 victory to the list. Maybe the stakes weren't as high as some of the previous memorable games there, but enough happened before, during and after this 3-hour, 48-minute ballgame to fill a week's worth of stories.

A Nationals club that placed two pitchers on the COVID-19 injury list shortly before first pitch saw Max Scherzer grind out five tough innings, Juan Soto snap out of his power funk with a jaw-dropping homer, Victor Robles continue his surge at the plate but also depart with an ankle injury, Trea Turner get called out yet again for running inside the baseline and Davey Martinez get ejected again for arguing that call with the best rant of his managerial career.

Oh, and a five-out escape job by Daniel Hudson in front of a shaky ninth inning from Brad Hand to close out a tight victory to snap a two-game losing streak.

What goes through your mind at the end of all that?

"A curly W," Martinez said with a laugh to open his postgame Zoom session with reporters.

Indeed, the Nationals went 1-0 tonight, but so much more went into their 17th victory of the season than anyone would ever gather from glancing at the box score in the morning.

The Turner-Martinez moment had no bearing on the final outcome, but it surely provided the video highlight everyone will be watching for the next 24 hours (and perhaps the next 24 years). Leading off the top of the seventh, Turner struck out on a ball in the dirt that skipped to the backstop, so he took off for first base.

Willson Contreras' throw was both wide and late, but plate umpire Chris Conroy nonetheless called Turner out for interference, a controversial call the Nats shortstop (and every fan of the franchise) is all too familiar with from Game 6 of the 2019 World Series.

And just as he did that late October night in Houston, Martinez lost his mind and was ejected. This time, instead of going after the umpire in question, Martinez went after first base. He picked it up off its peg, slammed to the ground and then kicked it for good measure before leaving the premises.

And then, at the end of the night, Martinez told everyone how he really feels about this rule that has gone against his shortstop three times in the last 19 months.

"Honestly, I am beside myself now with this whole out-of-the-baseline thing," he said. "I think it's awful. There's two parts to the rule, I get it: The second part of the rule is the judgment call. For me, it's a bad judgment, plain and simple. If you want to run on the other side of the baseline, put the base over there, plain and simple. I argue that all the time. But if he's running straight down the line, and the catcher makes a bad throw, what do you do? What do you do? He didn't even run hard, and he made it to first base, and he's going to come out and call him out?

"I'm over it. Really, I'm over it. I'm tired of it. I'm going to argue 1,000 times when that happens, I really am. I'm sick of it. You guys saw it. It's a brutal call. And I'm done hiding it. I don't know what they're going to do about it, but it's awful. And it wasn't just today. I've seen it go on and on and on. They need to do something about it."

Turner, for his part, believes this call was a more egregious use of the interference call than the more famous one that nearly cost him and the Nationals in the World Series.

"Oh, by far," he said. "I don't even know where to start. ... It's bad. It's just bad. I know they're trying out there, this and that, and they're trying to do their job. But it's terrible. It's bad. I think it was worse than Game 6."

Martinez could only watch the rest of this game from the visiting manager's office, perhaps flipping between this contest and double overtime of the Capitals-Bruins playoff game, while bench coach Tim Bogar managed the final three innings, which saw Hand serve up a solo homer to Javier Báez and a single to Kris Bryant in the bottom of the ninth before recording the last out for the save.

"Bogey and I talk about scenarios, before the game, during the game," Martinez said. "He did a great job."

It was a wild capper to a wild day that began with upsetting news, the Nationals learning both Erick Fedde and Tanner Rainey would need to go on the COVID-19 IL after one of them (vaccinated) tested positive for the coronavirus and the other (unvaccinated) was deemed a close contact. The news left the Nats scrambling to submit their 26-man roster and starting lineup only about 40 minutes before first pitch.

(After the game, Scherzer would publicly reveal Fedde was the vaccinated player who tested positive and go on to make an impassioned argument for Major League Baseball to change its protocols to allow players in such a position to avoid going on the IL.)

Once the proceedings did get underway, things settled in and the Nats watched Scherzer do his thing. He would wind up striking out eight batters over five innings, leaving him with 2,680 for his career and sole possession of 19th place on the all-time list.

It was not, however, a nice and easy outing for Scherzer, who found himself in a spot he rarely has this season: trying to prevent the opposition from sustaining a long, drawn-out rally.

Entering the game, Scherzer had allowed only 12 earned runs this year. Eleven of those runs scored via homer. The only one that didn't? It occurred when Robles lost a fly ball in the sun at Dodger Stadium back in early April.

The Cubs, though, did what nobody else has been able to do and actually strung together hits. They got two singles and a walk in the second, taking a 1-0 lead. And then came the longest half-inning of the night: a 34-pitch slog through the bottom of the fifth that saw four straight batters reach base (one walk, three singles, including Ian Happ's RBI blooper into center field).

Scherzer, though, minimized the damage. With the bases loaded, he struck out Contreras on a high fastball, then got David Bote to fly out to center to end the inning, pounding his glove with his bare hand as he hopped off the mound with a 4-2 lead intact.

"I did what I had to do to grind through it," Scherzer said. "They put together some good ABs, they drove my pitch count up. I also walked four guys. I never take pride in that, and that's the reason why I wasn't able to pitch deeper. ... The situation got real there in the fifth. I was able to get a big strikeout and a big popout to keep the game where it was."

That final frame left Scherzer's total pitch count at 100. He was coming off a shorter, 85-pitch start in Arizona in which he was pulled early with the Nats up big. But given how hard he had to work to get through the fifth, Martinez decided not to push his ace any farther. He handed over the rest of the game to his bullpen, hoping the group could make the lead hold up.

The Nationals provided that lead with a string of two-strike hits off Jake Arrieta, six of them to be precise. Robles got it all started with a one-out double in the third, scoring moments later on Turner's single to center. Robles (celebrating his 24th birthday) would deliver again in the fourth, ripping a two-out base hit to left to score Yan Gomes but subsequently producing the scariest moment of the night when his right ankle got twisted as he rounded first seeking a double.

The way he was writhing in pain on the ground, Robles appeared to have suffered a serious injury. After some time and an exam by director of athletic training Paul Lessard, though, the young center field got back on his feet, jogged around and convinced the authorities he could remain in the game.

Not surprisingly, Robles would be pulled in the seventh, replaced in center field by Andrew Stevenson, who wound up making a diving catch on a sinking liner to potentially save a run from scoring. Martinez said Robles was getting the ankle X-rayed to determine if there was any structural damage.

"Hopefully, he's OK," the manager said. "At first, I was really concerned. I thought it could be his Achilles, the way he went down. And then I told him I had to take him out of the game, and he shot up like a rocket and started running. But it did get sore as the game progressed."

The sixth and last of the Nationals' two-strike hits off Arrieta was the most impressive. On a 3-2 slider on the inside corner, Soto got his hands in, and as he dropped to a knee launched the ball off the scoreboard in right field. The still-searching slugger's first homer in 12 days capped a recent surge that has seen him go 5-for-7 with nine total bases.

"We're figuring it out, little by little," Soto said. "I feel great, I've started to hit the ball in the air a couple times. It feels almost normal again."

It's a significant development for this team. And yet, given everything else that happened tonight, it felt like a footnote.