Pair of homers and effective pitching carry Nats to 6-2 victory

PHILADELPHIA - Rather than stress too much over how he was going to cobble together his bullpen tonight, Dusty Baker conjured up a less-stressful road map to victory a few hours before the Nationals and Phillies took the field.

"Hopefully we score a lot of runs," the manager said. "And hopefully Cole goes deep in the game."

Baker got his wish. On both counts. The Nationals once again got homers from Ryan Zimmerman and Anthony Rendon. And they got six innings of one-run ball from A.J. Cole, making life easier for the bullpen to finish off a 6-2 victory at Citizens Bank Park.

At 21-9, the Nationals are off to the best 30-game start in franchise history.

Cole, taking over for now as the club's No. 5 starter with Joe Ross demoted to Triple-A Syracuse and Jacob Turner helping the cause in the bullpen, put forth one of his most effective outings in limited big league time. The right-hander was hit hard at times but was helped by strong defense and some well-placed line drives and emerged with a quality start to his name.

As they have done for just about every member of their rotation through the season's first five weeks, the Nationals provided a good amount of run support.

Zimmerman delivered the first big blow, a two-run homer to left-center in the top of the fourth that gave the Nats their first lead against Vince Velasquez. Zimmerman's league-leading 13th home run came only two innings after he was robbed of another potential homer by Odúbel Herrera at the center field wall.

Zimmerman can do no wrong right now, and the sixth inning might have been confirmation of that. He scorched a line drive to right but watched as Michael Saunders lost the ball in the lights. It sailed over Saunders' head and Zimmerman cruised into second base with a run-scoring double, leaving the guy who leads the majors in most offensive categories with a .439 batting average and .916 slugging percentage.

Rendon then delivered the decisive blow moments later, a three-run homer to left that had the Philly crowd booing and had the visiting team leading 6-1. It was the capper to a brilliant week for Rendon, who, beginning with Sunday's record-setting afternoon at the plate, has gone 12-for-23 with three doubles, five homers and 17 RBIs in six games.

Despite all the positive things that happened for his team in the first six innings, Baker did still need to get nine outs from his bullpen, the available and effective members of which have been changing on a nightly basis.

He got three outs from Oliver Pérez, though the veteran left-hander gave up a home run to Cameron Rupp in the seventh and plunked Herrera to open the eighth. Jacob Turner took over, though, and quickly induced a double play before striking out Tommy Joseph to end the inning in short order.

And because he was efficient - and because the other available options weren't more enticing - Turner returned for the ninth and finished off the win.