{"id":16242,"date":"2019-10-23T08:20:49","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T12:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=16242"},"modified":"2019-10-23T08:22:48","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T12:22:48","slug":"ws-game-1-quick-recap-shocking-win-for-nats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=16242","title":{"rendered":"WS Game 1 quick recap; shocking win for Nats"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Can't<\/a>

Can’t even buy a beer; but he’s already a post-season star. Photo via NYpost<\/p><\/div>\n

So, in my preview, I thought that the Nats really could “steal” one of the two games in Houston.\u00a0 \u00a0I never thought they’d steal game 1 by getting to\u00a0Gerrit Cole<\/strong>.\u00a0 But they did; putting more runs on him (5) in just a handful of innings than he’d given up in 22+ across three previous post season starts.\u00a0 So much for narrative.\u00a0 And I don’t think he pitched “badly” per se; i think the Nats just hit the ball well and made him pay for upper-zone fastball misses like other teams have not.<\/p>\n

Hand it to this team; this was a complete team effort to win.\u00a0 \u00a0Max Scherzer<\/strong> just didn’t look sharp on the night, burning through nearly 110 pitches in 5 innings.\u00a0 He didn’t seem like he had any command of his off-speed stuff, and Houston is just too good of a hitting team to not make you pay.\u00a0\u00a0Patrick Corbin<\/strong> worked his way through his mid-start relief inning (notably; does this push his start to game 4 instead of game 3?\u00a0 Not a bad idea honestly if you think\u00a0Anibal Sanchez<\/strong> is the hotter hand to take possibly two post-season starts),\u00a0Daniel Hudson<\/strong> bailed out the shaky outing from\u00a0Tanner Rainey<\/strong>, and\u00a0Sean Doolittle<\/strong> kept it together to close it out.\u00a0 Great pitcher management on the night;\u00a0Davey Martinez<\/strong> did not hesitate to yank Rainey and keep the inning from getting out of hand.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the hitting: up and down the order, the Nats made it happen.\u00a0 Credit to\u00a0Ryan Zimmerman<\/strong> for putting the team back into the game, of course credit to “working his way towards a post-season MVP award”\u00a0Juan Soto<\/strong> for having a game of the ages on the biggest possible stage.\u00a0 But up and down the order, this team got timely hits.<\/p>\n

I thought the Nats might be able to get to\u00a0Verlander<\/strong> in game 2; can they possibly take two games on foreign soil again?<\/p>\n

One other point: one through nine, this Astros lineup is stacked (well, at least 1-7).\u00a0 Geeze.\u00a0 All night i’m chewing nails watching them try to get through this order.\u00a0 Giving up “only” four runs seemed like an accomplishment; the Nats are going to have to hit this series moreso than I thought just to keep up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, in my preview, I thought that the Nats really could “steal” one of the two games in Houston.\u00a0 \u00a0I never thought they’d steal game 1 by getting to\u00a0Gerrit Cole.\u00a0 But they did; putting more runs on him (5) in just a handful of innings than he’d given up in 22+ across three previous post […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[777,548,4277,1221,3314,44,1037,1855,36,1347,3986],"class_list":["post-16242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natsgeneral","tag-anibal-sanchez","tag-daniel-hudson","tag-davey-martinez","tag-gerrit-cole","tag-juan-soto","tag-justin-verlander","tag-max-scherzer","tag-patrick-corbin","tag-ryan-zimmerman","tag-sean-doolittle","tag-tanner-rainey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16242"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16246,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16242\/revisions\/16246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}