Against a late Canadian dusk, a lost ball costs the Nats

TORONTO - The ball came off Teoscar Hernández's bat, went high in the air toward right field and left just about everyone inside Rogers Centre assuming it would fall harmlessly into Adam Eaton's glove for the first out in the bottom of the seventh.

Alas, both Eaton and Gio Gonzalez knew otherwise. Because each knew the same thing: They had no clue where the ball was, hidden somewhere in the post-9 p.m., mid-June Canadian dusk.

"As soon as it goes up, it's a pretty helpless feeling," Eaton said inside the Nationals clubhouse an hour later, his team having suffered a 6-5 loss to the Blue Jays made possible in part by his misplay.

When the inning ended, Toronto having gone on to score three runs to blow open a tie game, Eaton went up to Gonzalez in the dugout and apologized for the mistake. Gonzalez, who delivered the pitch that Hernández lofted high into the sky, couldn't fault his right fielder at all.

"I'll be honest with you: I was with Adam on that one," the left-hander said. "I didn't see it at all. As soon as he hit it, it completely disappeared. I didn't see it at all, and I sympathize with him."

We'll never know whether the outcome of this game would have been different had Eaton hauled in the fly ball. The Blue Jays might have rallied regardless. But we do know what happened after the misplay.

Instead of one out and a runner on first, the Blue Jays had nobody out and runners on second and third after Hernández's ball bounced off the artificial turf and over the fence for a ground-rule double. Instead of entering a relatively stress-free situation, reliever Justin Miller entered with zero room for error.

Miller got the next batter, Justin Smoak, to send another fly ball to right. This time, Eaton caught it with ease, but he had no chance to throw out the runner tagging up from third to score the go-ahead run. And then came the biggest blow of all: a towering, two-run homer by Yangervis Solarte (his second of the night) off a 3-1 pitch from Miller.

"I've been throwing the ball well," Miller said. "I was trying to throw a fastball away, and it just kind of cut on me. So he likes to hit down and in. Hats off to him. He hit a good pitch."

It was the first run Miller has surrendered this season in 24 2/3 innings, spread out between Triple-A Syracuse and Washington. The journeyman 31-year-old has been an out-of-nowhere sensation. His perfect season couldn't last forever, right?

"It's gonna sting, but it's fine," Miller said. "It's baseball. Like you said, I'm not going to go out there and not give up a run for an entire season. There's a reason there's 'ERA' up there. There's a hit category, there's a run category, there's all that stuff. It was bound to happen one of those times."

There also was the question of the timing of Miller's entrance into the game. Gonzalez had thrown 94 pitches over six innings, only one of those a clean, 1-2-3 frame. The Blue Jays had a pair of right-handed batters due up (Devon Travis and Hernández), then switch-hitters Smoak and Solarte.

Did Davey Martinez consider pulling Gonzalez after the sixth and letting Miller start the inning clean?

"It's the bottom of the order," the manager said. "I liked Gio. When he's down, he gets those ground balls. I thought he could get through that inning. Then, tie game, we'd be in good shape. I think he pitched really well."

Gonzalez said he "felt great" when he opened the seventh inning. And again, all he did was surrender an opposite-field single to Travis and get Hernández to loft a routine fly ball to right.

Sadly, he knew what Eaton knew, but nobody else in the ballpark knew: The man who needed to see that routine fly ball couldn't see it.

"I can't pout or hang my head about it," Eaton said. "It's just part of baseball. It's a helpless feeling when the ball goes up and you don't see it."