After aggravating delay, Nationals lose game and Taylor

The 3-hour, 5-minute rain delay - or the 3-hour, 5-minute non-rain delay, a more accurate description - was bad enough and will have long-lasting negative ramifications for the Nationals, who mishandled an admittedly tricky situation.

The subsequent 5-2 loss to the Braves that required 3 hours, 10 minutes to play and was completed at 1:20 a.m. didn't help matters, though the result of one game shouldn't have long-lasting ramifications.

But then throw the loss of Michael A. Taylor to a strained right oblique muscle - an injury that will send the center fielder to the 10-day disabled list - on top of all this and it's hard to describe tonight's proceedings on South Capitol Street as anything other than an utterly miserable experience for the Nationals.

"That's tough, man," said Brian Goodwin, who may become the club's new starting center fielder by default. "He's an everyday guy for us. He's a big dog out there in center field. ... That's a guy that we're definitely going to miss."

Taylor admitted he had been dealing with soreness in his right side for a couple of weeks - remember the pair of games he missed with an injury the Nationals refused at the time to disclose? - but he managed to play through it without incident. Until he fouled off a pitch in the bottom of the third tonight, when he felt "a sharp pain in my side." He finished the at-bat, grounding out to third base, then did not return to take the field for the top of the fourth.

"It was starting to go the right way," Taylor said. "It's just been up and down since then. I tried to manage my reps and things like that to give myself the time to heal. But when you play, it's kind of tough to do that."

Manager Dusty Baker said Taylor will be placed on the DL on Friday, and that Chris Heisey (out since May 24 with a ruptured right biceps tendon) will be activated and take his roster spot. The Nationals are hopeful they caught the injury soon enough that Taylor won't need more than the minimum 10 days off - the All-Star break counts as time served - before returning, but there's no guarantee yet of that.

"You want to get him well," Baker said. "Because you don't want that to come back."

The unusual circumstances of tonight's game, with a long delay that aggravated the players waiting in the clubhouse as much as it aggravated the fans waiting it out in the stands, couldn't have helped Taylor. The .278-hitting outfielder, though, insisted it played no role in his eventual injury.

"No, I don't think so," he said. "I've been dealing with it for a while. I had plenty of notice. I did everything that I normally do to try to get it hot and get it ready for the game. I felt pretty good. Obviously not 100 percent, but starting the game I felt OK. But just that swing, it got worse."

The Taylor injury was among the several discouraging developments on this long night, perhaps trumping what looked like the most significant takeaway from the evening: the likely loss of goodwill from a fan base that voiced its displeasure at the manner in which this game was played in the first place.

At 6:40 p.m., there was every reason to believe heavy rain would be arriving in the District at some point, with most forecasts calling for the system to reach the ballpark around 8:30 p.m. The Nationals, who have control of the game until lineup cards are exchanged and handed to umpires, had two seemingly obvious choices: 1) Start the game on time and try to play as much as possible before the rain arrived, or 2) Bite the bullet and announce a postponement even though the rain was a couple hours away.

Instead, the club went with a third, unforeseen option: Go into a delay, then wait and see what happens.

What happened was this: It didn't rain a drop until 9:08 p.m. At times, pockets of blue sky peeked through the clouds above. The tarp wasn't unfurled to cover the infield until 8:19 p.m., at which point many of the thousands of fans in attendance began to boo.

"We were told that there was a pretty severe storm coming," Baker said. "But the weatherman, as you know, has been wrong before. And it's hard to predict weather. So that's what we were told. We didn't want to have the field in bad conditions, and we didn't want to start in the rain and waste a pitcher."

The rain that did eventually fall was light, certainly not intense enough to prevent a game from continuing had it already been underway.

Finally, at 9:35 p.m., the Nationals provided their first update in nearly three hours, announcing: "It is our sincere hope that we will be able to play tonight's game. The weather system that we have been monitoring is beginning to reach the ballpark and should pass through shortly. It is our hope that once it moves out we will be able to play. Thank you for your patience."

A few minutes later, Gio Gonzalez and Mike Foltynewicz emerged from their respective dugouts and began to stretch in the outfield. Teammates soon followed, as the grounds crew rolled up the tarp, not needing to take extra time to remove any excess water (because there was none).

And so it was that at 10:10 p.m., with a couple thousand fans still in the park, with Nationals director of entertainment Tom Davis performing the national anthem after the original singer departed, Gonzalez threw the first pitch of the game.

"We tried to make jokes out of the 15-minute rain delay," a clearly perturbed Gonzalez said afterward. "A 7 o'clock game, for 15 minutes of rain, that's unbelievable. I'm talking to you at 1:30 in the morning right now. Fifteen-minute delay."

The ensuing contest included effective, though not dominant, performances from the two starting pitchers. Gonzalez allowed three runs in six innings, burned by Freddie Freeman's RBI double in the third, Johan Camargo's RBI single in the fourth and Kurt Suzuki's homer in the sixth. Foltynewicz allowed two runs in six innings, the damage against him coming via Anthony Rendon's double and a couple of productive outs behind him in the second and Goodwin's leadoff homer in the fifth.

"That's not the excuse," Gonzalez said, referring to the long delay before he took the mound. "I should have pitched better. I should have pitched a better game."

Baker handed a one-run game to his bullpen in the top of the seventh, and it quickly became a three-run game when Sammy Solís allowed three doubles in the span of five batters.

The two sides then played out the rest of the evening, the Nationals stranding two more of the nine runners they left on base in the game. When Adam Lind finally grounded out to short to end the proceedings at 1:20 a.m., what remained of an announced crowd of 22,724 - perhaps 1,000 at that point - filed out of the park bleary-eyed.

Inside the clubhouse, bleary-eyed players showered, dressed and departed themselves, aggravated by everything that took place over the preceding six-plus hours.

"You were waiting for the same thing we were waiting for: No rain, and we just had to wait," Gonzalez said. "We didn't know what the heck was going on until 10 o'clock. That's what we were told."