Gore again:
“We can do better than what we did in the first half,” Mackenzie Gore said. Quote from MASN’s Bobby Blanco In the first half of the season, he started in 19 games, posting a 4.01 ERA, 3.08 FIP, 37 walks (3.38 walks per nine innings), and 116 strikeouts (10.58 strikeouts per nine innings) with a .268 ERA, .341 on-base percentage, and .387 slugging percentage in 98 2⁄3 innings.
“The way he pitches is shocking,” Nationals manager Davey Martinez said when asked about Gore’s pitching before the All-Star game.
“He’s still learning. We need to get him to understand that if he throws four pitches or less per at-bat, he’ll be OK.”
“He’s got to figure out how to get that finishing pitch. He gets deep in the count and then he finishes it, but we need him to finish it early.”
That didn’t happen in his 20th appearance, when Gore threw 48 pitches for seven. Cincinnati RedsIn the first innings of last night’s game, the Nationals gave up two walks to two batters, and once again got Washington out early on an RBI single, a one-out walk and a sacrifice fly. They ultimately came from behind for the 26th time this season, but the Nationals had to bring in a relief pitcher after the third inning to pull off the comeback.
Gore added 19 pitches in the second inning, for a total of 67, and ended the inning with a two-out walk, an RBI double and finally a grounder.
Martinez decided that enough was enough.
“Today, anyway, he was very much a rotation pitcher,” Martinez said, explaining that by “rotation pitcher” he means “strikeout swinging.” “And we realized that pretty early on. He threw 68 pitches in two innings.
“I wasn’t going to send him out there again.”
He even considered taking Goa as a first step.
“All I can say now is that he doesn’t understand it. [last] “Once a batter was out, he was out,” Martinez said after the team’s 5-4 win over the Reds.
“It was a long innings batting-wise so I tried to get him to pitch again, to finish it in 10-15 pitches and see what happens, but it was just too long.”
That didn’t stop Gore from arguing with the manager in the Nationals dugout.
“The thing about McKenzie is, I don’t know if he saw us in the dugout, but he wanted to stay in the game,” Martinez said. “I think that’s great for him, but I have to be smart about it.”
The next step is to evaluate what’s going wrong and fix it. Gore’s ERA this year dropped from 3.47 on July 4 to 4.20 after last night’s game. Both Martinez and Gore said the organization knows what’s going wrong.
“He was very rotational,” Martinez reiterated in his post-match press conference.
“He had a lot of misses off his arm side, so we’re going to get him back in the right position. Like I said, he’s a future All-Star, so we’re going to work with him and get him back in the right position. I know he’s a little frustrated right now. He’s going to blame himself. He’s going to talk to you and say all sorts of things, but we’re going to get him back in the right position.”
“We’re going to solve this problem,” Gore said in the post-match scrum. “I know what the problem is. I’m going to stop talking about it and figure out a way. Next time I throw it, I’m going to figure out a better way.”
Gore summed it up succinctly: “I was bad.”
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Photo by Jess Rapfogel/Getty Images
“I just didn’t have the strike pitches to get back in the count, and I think that’s been my problem in my last six starts,” he said.
“Instead of 1-1, 1-2, it’s 2-0, 3-0 and it’s awful. We’re not getting hits, we’re just walking a lot of batters.
“So I have to figure out how to get rid of it, and I will, but yeah, after the last few issues, this is a frustrating problem…”
Comeback #26:
The Reds played in Game 3 in Washington and were up 2-0 after two innings, but the Nationals scored two in the bottom of the first on a two-run home run by Harold Ramirez (number 2), and the visitors added one each in the third and fourth innings. The home team then made it 4-3 in the fourth inning when C.J. Abrams rushed to first base and hit a soft grounder to the first baseman (Jeimer Candelario) that Reds pitcher Nick Lodolo couldn’t reach in time.
In the seventh inning, Lane Thomas hit a timely double to tie the game at 4-4, then Jacob Young hit reliever Justin Wilson’s first pitch, a cutter, into left field for the game-winning hit, 5-4.
“We knew Wilson was going to throw the ball up high,” Martinez said of the scouting report before Young’s at-bat.
“I told all the hitters, ‘Don’t let the baseball slow down. Don’t try too hard.'”
Young got up and went in for the cutter.
“It was a perfect swing,” Martinez said. “A really good swing. I put the ball on top and hit it with a low line drive that bounced once. It was beautiful.”
With Gore out, Jordan Weems (1 ER/1 IP), Robert Garcia (0 ER/1 IP), Dylan Floro (0 ER/2 IP), Derek Law (0 ER/2 IP) and Kyle Finnegan (0 ER/1 IP/S) took to the mound and kept things close until the offense got going.
“The guys are going to play their hardest to get that 27 outs and we’re not going to give up,” Martinez said.
“We kept it pretty close throughout the game, and I think the other team felt like they had a chance to win the game. So our bullpen was perfect. They did a really good job. They gave us what we needed. Finnegan shut them out. The way the whole game played out, I can remember CJ getting a single and scoring a run right away. That was awesome. If we can play with that intensity every day, good things are going to happen.”
“Jacob took a big hit, obviously, but the guys responded great today.”
