Another bullpen meltdown sends Nats to painful 5-4 loss

BALTIMORE - They got eight dominant innings from Max Scherzer. They got a huge pinch-hit homer from Adam Lind. All the Nationals needed were three outs from their bullpen before surrendering two runs.

For this bullpen, that's no simple task. And so what should have been a nice, uplifting victory over the Orioles instead turned into a 5-4 12-inning loss and the latest nightmare for this talented team with one painfully glaring hole.

Enny Romero was the culprit this time. Handed a two-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, the hard-throwing left-hander proceeded to give it back during a harrowing frame that included a miscommunication in the outfield, a balk and back-to-back RBI hits that tied sent the game to extra innings.

After the Nationals squandered a scoring opportunity in the top of the 10th, the Orioles squandered their own in the bottom of the inning, an inning that included an overturned call and an error, plus a near-dropped popup by Wilmer Difo (who had just taken over at second base when Daniel Murphy was ejected by plate umpire Laz Diaz).

The Nationals avoided disaster in the 11th when Bryce Harper fired a one-hop strike to the plate to nail J.J. Hardy, who would have scored the winning run.

The painful end came in the bottom of the 12th. Adam Jones' one-out single off Jacob Turner set the stage. Manny Machado's broken-bat single put the winning runner 90 feet away. And Mark Trumbo's single to left won it for the Orioles and sent the Nationals to trudge off the field dismayed.

Things looked much better only a short while earlier. Lind's three-run blast off Ubaldo Jiménez in the top of the eighth, already his third pinch-hit homer of the young season, gave the Nationals a 4-1 lead and one of their most uplifting moments of the year.

It gave the Nationals a three-run lead late in what had been a tense pitchers' duel between Jimenez and Scherzer, who gladly accepted that lead and tried to finish off his latest dominant start. Scherzer wound up going eight innings, allowing only a pair of solo homers, to keep manager Dusty Baker from having to ask for more than three outs from his makeshift bullpen.

But even three outs are a challenge for this group right now. Romero got into immediate trouble when he walked Davis to open the ninth. A fly ball that fell between Brian Goodwin and Harper in right-center field would've been disastrous if not for Goodwin's ability to get the ball back in to second base before Davis could get there himself.

But one out from victory, Romero gave up an RBI double to Jonathan Schoop, then an RBI single to Hardy, leaving the game tied and the crowd in a frenzy.

Scherzer was unhittable from the get-go, but this is nothing new for the right-hander. He has now made 74 starts in a Nationals uniform, and in 10 of those starts he has carried a no-hitter into at least the sixth inning, most in the majors in that time.

Scherzer wasn't perfect - he walked Smith to open the bottom of the first and then walked Schoop in the bottom of the fifth - but he was dominant, relying on a crisp slider to strike out six-of-eight batters during one stretch.

Not that Scherzer's counterpart was significantly worse on this night. Jiménez had the Nationals lineup baffled himself, allowing only two hits through his first six innings. The only blemish - and the only run produced by other team for a good stretch of the game - was a 3-1 pitch to Murphy in the top of the second. Murphy blasted it to right for his sixth homer of the season and a 1-0 lead.

That one run stood up for quite a while, but it wasn't going to stand up the entire night. Sure enough, Smith stepped to the plate with one out in the bottom of the sixth and proceeded to send a changeup from Scherzer deep to right. Just like that, the no-hitter was no more and the Nationals' lead was no more.

This was now a full-fledged pitchers' duel, and quite a good one at that.

But then the game turned in the eighth when Lind, batting for Michael A. Taylor with two on and one out, launched a three-run homer to center to give the Nationals the lead. The veteran slugger, a starter most of his career before signing with the Nats on the eve of spring training to back up Ryan Zimmerman at first base, is now 6-for-11 with three homers and nine RBIs as a pinch-hitter.

Baker let Scherzer return to the mound for the eighth with the 4-1 lead. Scherzer did surrender a solo homer to Jones to cut the lead to two runs and bring his manager from the dugout for a conversation. But Scherzer forcefully informed Baker he could handle Machado, and indeed he did, getting the Baltimore slugger to fly out down the left field line, with Chris Heisey making a nice catch in foul territory.

All looked safe for the Nationals at that point. Of course, nothing is safe for the Nationals these days.