Doolittle gets a much-needed "wakeup call" with blown save

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - It's easy to take Sean Doolittle for granted, because he's been so automatic for the Nationals when healthy the last 1 1/2 seasons. Maybe Doolittle even takes himself for granted sometimes, especially during a spring in which he had retired 12 of the 13 batters he had faced before taking the mound in the ninth inning this afternoon.

The left-hander won't do that anymore, not after a disastrous appearance that saw him allow five runs and turn a 5-3 lead into an 8-5 exhibition loss to the Cardinals.

"The line is really ugly, but I kind of needed a wakeup call like that," he said. "My first four outings, I kind of sleepwalked through them. I wish it wasn't that harsh, but there's a lot of good (lessons) in that outing."

There wasn't much out of the ordinary early on in the ninth. Doolittle allowed a leadoff single to Randy Arozarena but then retired Evan Mendoza and Dylan Carlson with relative ease. He threw 11 of his first 12 pitches for strikes, though his fastball velocity fluctuated between 89-92 mph.

"I was just kind of going over it in my head," he said, "and I was really happy with how I threw the ball to the first three guys."

That's when things took a decided turn in the wrong direction. Doolittle left a 92 mph fastball over the plate to Tommy Edman, who belted it off the center field wall for an RBI double. He then couldn't put away Elehuris Montero, who after falling behind 0-2 in the count took four consecutive fastballs up and out of the zone to draw a walk.

At this point, Doolittle had thrown 22 pitches, more than in any previous outing this spring. That might normally be cause for a mid-inning pitching change, but manager Davey Martinez wanted to push his closer up to roughly the 30-pitch mark.

"He's been out there not throwing many pitches, so we kind of wanted to push him a little bit," Martinez said. "And rightfully when I asked him, he said, yeah, he kind of ran out of gas there at the end. It was good that he did that."

Doolittle fully supported the plan.

"It was good to get stretched out like that," he said. "And I was totally on the same page as Davey. I was trying to fight through it. And I'm glad he let me kind of battle through it. It was good to have to manage the running game, and pitch with guys on base and try to work my way through an inning when I started to get a little tired. That's going to help me in the long run."

It didn't help today, though, because a physically taxed Doolittle looked nothing like his usual self as the inning unraveled. He threw five pitches to Max Schrock, one of them an 88 mph fastball, the others sliders between 77-79 mph, the last of which was flipped into shallow right field for the game-tying single.

And then, on his 28th pitch of the inning, Doolittle grooved an 87 mph fastball to Andrew Knizner that was promptly launched over the left field bullpen for a three-run homer.

"By that time," the lefty said, "I was out of juice, and that guy got me."

Doolittle said his arm was fine, he simply had been pushed past his limit for a mid-March outing that came after only four game outings in the previous 18 days.

Better now than in a couple of weeks when the stakes are real.

"That's a spring training outing in a nutshell right there," he said. "I came off the mound feeling good I got stretched out. I threw a ton of pitches. But unfortunately the results just weren't there."